A chameleon-like drive that shifts its nature based mostly on its atmosphere may clarify a significant physics quandary: how the mysterious substance known as darkish vitality is compelling the cosmos to develop sooner and sooner. But a brand new experiment casts doubt on some chameleon theories, researchers report August 25 in Nature Physics.
The chameleon drive can be a fifth kind of drive past the fundamental 4: gravitational, robust, weak and electromagnetic. And like a chameleon altering its colours, the hypothetical fifth drive would morph relying on the density of its environment. In dense environments like Earth, this fifth drive can be feeble, camouflaging its results. In the sparseness of house, the drive can be stronger and long-ranged.
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This drive would consequence from a chameleon discipline — an addition to the identified fields in physics, reminiscent of electrical, magnetic and gravitational fields. A chameleon discipline with these morphing properties may drive the accelerating growth of the universe with out disagreeing with measurements on Earth.
But it’s a problem to suss out such a changeling drive. On Earth, says astrophysicist Jianhua He of Nanjing University in China, “it’s very, very tiny. That’s the most difficult part.”
So He and colleagues designed a detector to seek for a delicate fifth drive. A wheel with plastic movies connected spins previous one other movie sitting on a magnetically levitated piece of graphite. If a chameleon drive actually exists, the movies spinning by would trigger a periodic drive on the levitating plastic, pulling it up and down. (Gravity additionally acts this fashion, however because of the machine’s design, it needs to be a lot weaker than a chameleon drive.)
The staff was in a position to rule out a class of chameleon theories. In the long run, the researchers hope to enhance their outcomes by chilling their machine to permit for extra delicate measurements.