Speaker: Andrea Donini
Title: A dynamical method to measure deviations from the 1/r^2 Newton's law
Abstract: In Refs. [1,2], we proposed a new experimental setup aiming at the measurement of deviations from the Newtonian 1/r gravitational potential. The idea is to follow the orbits of a microscopical-sized "planetary system" consisting of a ~ 10^5 g "Planet" and a ~ 10^-8 g "Satellite". Orbit precession in this system is a smoking gun for terms in the potential different from 1/r due, thus avoiding most of the electrically-induced background, that can be cast in the form of a 1/r potential, i.e. the same functional dependence from r of the Newtonian potential.
Once corrections to the Newtonian potential are expressed in terms of a Yukawa-like term, alpha exp(-r/lambda), with lambda the typical length scale at which new physics set in, using this approach we can increase the present sensitivity to deviations from the Newton's law in by an order of magnitude, testing lambda down to a few microns for alpha = O(1).
We are now moving to a new phase, in which a real experiment will try to perform this measurement. I will introduce the basic ideas behind this proposal, and to sketch what we plan to realize [3].
1) Donini, Marimón, Eur.Phys.J.C 76 (2016) 12, 696; arXiv:1609.05654
2) Baeza-Ballesteros, Donini, Nadal-Gisbert, Eur.Phys.J.C 82 (2022) 2, 154; arXiv:2106.08611
3) Baeza-Ballesteros, Donini, Molina-Terriza, Monrabal, Simón; arXiv:2312.13736