Shining Light on Dark Energy and Modifications of Gravity

Abstract

Many theories of dark energy and modified gravity give rise to scalar fields that couple derivatively to the energy momentum tensor of matter. This is known as disformal coupling. I will show that laboratory searches for axions are ideally suited to search for and constrain disformal scalar fields.

Comments: 4 pages, 1 figure. Contributed to the 8th Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs, Chicago, July 18-22, 2012