Freiburg 2008 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 17: Beyond the Standard Model (Theorie) III

T 17.9: Talk

Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 18:45–19:00, KGI-HS 1021

A Signature for Chameleons in Axion-Like Particle Search Experiments — •Christoph Weniger — DESY Hamburg

Scalar-Tensor theories are well known and viable generalizations of General Relativity. In recent publications, it was shown that these theories can satisfy all astronomical bounds even if the scalar field couples to matter much stronger than gravity. This is due to the fact that the effective mass of the scalar field strongly depends on the density of the ambient matter. We point out that these strongly coupled fields, which were dubbed chameleons, might reveal themselves as an "afterglow" effect in axion-like particle search experiments due to chameleon photon conversion in a magnetic field. We estimate the parameter space which is accessible by currently available technology and find that afterglow experiments could constrain this parameter space in a way complementary to gravitational and Casimir force experiments.