TL;DR
The paper discusses how string-loop effects can keep the dilaton massless and compatible with gravity experiments, and how cosmology naturally suppresses its matter coupling, motivating more precise tests of Einstein's Equivalence Principle.
Contribution
It proposes a mechanism where string-loop effects and cosmological evolution suppress the dilaton's matter coupling, aligning string theory with experimental gravity constraints.
Findings
Dilaton can remain massless due to string-loop effects.
Cosmological evolution drives the dilaton towards decoupling from matter.
Current epoch predicts a very small but non-zero dilaton-matter coupling.
Abstract
It is pointed out that string-loop effects may generate matter couplings for the dilaton allowing this scalar partner of the tensorial graviton to stay massless while contributing to macroscopic gravity in a way naturally compatible with existing experimental data. Under a certain assumption of universality of the dilaton coupling functions (possibly realized through a discrete symmetry such as S-duality), the cosmological evolution drives the dilaton towards values where it decouples from matter. At the present cosmological epoch, the coupling to matter of the dilaton should be very small, but non zero. This provides a new motivation for improving the experimental tests of Einstein's Equivalence Principle.
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