Dark sectors lying beyond the Standard Model and containing sub-GeV particles which are bilinearly coupled to nucleons would induce quantum forces of the Casimir-Polder type in ordinary matter. Such new forces can be tested by a variety of experiments over many orders of magnitude. We provide a generic interpretation of these experimental searches and apply it to a sample of forces from dark scalars behaving as $1/r^3$, $1/r^5$, $1/r^7$ at short range. The landscape of constraints on such quantum forces differs from the one of modified gravity with Yukawa interactions and features, in particular, strong short-distance bounds from molecular spectroscopy and neutron scattering.

• Received 11 October 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.97.115034

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI. Funded by SCOAP³.

Published by the American Physical Society