Dilaton-induced open quantum dynamics

In modern cosmology, scalar fields with screening mechanisms are often used as explanations for phenomena like dark energy or dark matter. Amongst a zoo of models, the environment dependent dilaton, screened by the Polyakov–Damour mechanism, is one of the least constrained ones. Using recently developed path integral tools for directly computing reduced density matrices, we study the open quantum dynamics of a probe, modelled by another real scalar field, induced by interactions with an environment comprising fluctuations of a dilaton. As the leading effect, we extract a correction to the probe’s unitary evolution, which can be observed as a frequency shift. Assuming the scalar probe to roughly approximate a cold atom in matter wave interferometry, we show that comparing the predicted frequency shifts in two experimentally distinct setups has the potential to exclude large parts of the dilaton parameter space.