Constraints on short-range gravity with self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Bose-Einstein condensates can be used to set experimental constraints on hypothetical short-range modifications to gravity, such as Yukawa interactions, by analyzing collective excitations.

Contribution

It introduces a variational method to relate collective excitation frequencies of BECs to Yukawa gravity parameters, providing a new approach to test gravity at short ranges.

Findings

Constraints on Yukawa parameters derived from BEC collective modes.

Disk-shaped BECs offer improved bounds on short-range gravity.

Independent determination of Yukawa parameters possible with multiple frequency measurements.

Abstract

In this work, we study low-lying collective excitations of a Bose-Einstein condensate with Newtonian and Yukawa-like two-particle interaction and derive boundaries for both Yukawa parameters. Using a variational approach, we explicitly show for spherical condensate that the corresponding frequencies depend on the gravitational interaction strength. The acquired results are presented in contour plots and compared to experimentally verified data from other tests. Furthermore, we discuss experimental requirements to test our theoretical model as well as possibilities to improve the boundaries. In addition, we consider axisymmetric condensates, where it turns out that disk-shaped BECs lead to better constraints. We also show that in theory we can determine the values for both Yukawa parameters independently by a measurement of at least two collective frequencies.