Novel Screening with Two Bodies: Summing the ladder in disformal scalar-tensor theories

Understand

When augmenting our cosmological models or gravitational theories with an additional light scalar field, any coupling between matter and this scalar can affect the orbital motion of binary systems.

• Ordinarily, the new force mediated by the scalar can be naturally the same order of magnitude as the usual gravitational force and therefore is tightly constrained.
• We show that a disformal coupling between the scalar and matter can lead to a novel screening mechanism in which these fifth forces are suppressed by several orders of magnitude at sufficiently small separations and large relative velocities (such as solar system scales).
• This is a result of resumming a class of ladder diagrams, which suppresses the propagation of scalar signals between the two bodies.