Improvement for Testing the Gravitational Inverse-Square Law at the Submillimeter Range

Wen-Hai Tan^#, An-Bin Du^#, Wen-Can Dong, Shan-Qing Yang*, Cheng-Gang Shao, Sheng-Guo Guan, Qing-Lan Wang, 

Bi-Fu Zhan, Peng-Shun Luo, Liang-Cheng Tu, and Jun Luo*

We improve the test of the gravitational inverse-square law at the submillimeter range by suppressing the vibration of the electrostatic shielding membrane to reduce the disturbance coupled from the residual surface potential. The result shows that, at a 95% confidence level, the gravitational inverse-square law holds (|α| ≤ 1) down to a length scale λ = 48 μm. This work establishes the strongest bound on the magnitude α of the Yukawa violation in the range of 40–350 μm, and improves the previous bounds by up to a factor of 3 at the length scale λ ≈ 70 μm. Furthermore, the constraints on the power-law potentials are improved by about a factor of 2 for k = 4 and 5.

期刊名：PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

期/卷：124

页码：051301

发表时间：2020年2月

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.051301