1109.6249 (Lorenzo Iorio)

Environmental fifth-force hypothesis for the OPERA superluminal neutrino
phenomenology: constraints from orbital motions around the Earth    [PDF]

Lorenzo Iorio

It has been recently suggested by Dvali and Vikman [arXiv:1109.5685] that the superluminal neutrino phenomenology of the OPERA experiment may be due to an environmental feature of the Earth, naturally yielding a long-range fifth force of gravitational origin whose coupling with the neutrino is set by the scale M_*, in units of reduced Planck mass.. Its scale length l should not be smaller than one Earth's radius R_e, while its upper bound is expected to be slightly smaller than the Earth-Moon distance (60 Re). We analytically work out some orbital effects of a Yukawa-type fifth force for a test particle moving in the modified field of a central body. Our results are quite general since they are not restricted to any particular size of l; moreover, they are valid for an arbitrary orbital configuration of the particle, i.e. for any value of its eccentricity e. We find that the dimensionless strength coupling parameter alpha is constrained to |alpha| <= 1 10^-10 - 4 10^-9 for 1 R_e <= lambda <= 10 R_e by the laser data of the Earth's artificial satellite LAGEOS II, corresponding to M_* = 1.6 10^10 - 4 10^9. The Moon perigee allows to obtain |alpha| <= 3 10^-11 for the Earth-Moon pair in the range 15 R_e <= lambda <= 60 R_e, which translates as 3 10^10 <= M_* <= 4.5 10^10. The validity of our results is not necessarily limited to the superluminal OPERA scenario: they generally extend to any theoretical scenario implying a fifth-force of Yukawa-type.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6249