Disformal dark energy at colliders

TL;DR

This paper investigates how high-energy collider experiments can constrain disformally coupled scalar fields, a candidate for dark energy, by deriving new bounds from LHC data and analyzing their theoretical implications.

Contribution

It provides the first constraints on disformal couplings from collider data and discusses their theoretical behavior under renormalization group flow.

Findings

New bounds on disformal coupling strength from LHC run 1 data

Forecasted improvements from LHC run 2 data

Insights into the renormalization group flow of disformal couplings

Abstract

Disformally coupled, light scalar fields arise in many of the theories of dark energy and modified gravity that attempt to explain the accelerated expansion of the universe. They have proved difficult to constrain with precision tests of gravity because they do not give rise to fifth forces around static non-relativistic sources. However, because the scalar field couples derivatively to standard model matter, measurements at high energy particle colliders offer an effective way to constrain and potentially detect a disformally coupled scalar field. Here we derive new constraints on the strength of the disformal coupling from LHC run 1 data and provide a forecast for the improvement of these constraints from run 2. We additionally comment on the running of disformal and standard model couplings in this scenario under the renormalisation group flow.