We initiate a quantum treatment of chameleonlike particles, deriving classical and quantum forces directly from the path integral. It is found that the quantum force can potentially dominate the classical one by many orders of magnitude. We calculate the quantum chameleon pressure between infinite plates, which is found to interpolate between the Casimir and the integrated Casimir-Polder pressures, respectively in the limits of full screening and no screening. To this end we calculate the chameleon propagator in the presence of an arbitrary number of one-dimensional layers of material. For the Eöt-Wash experiment, the five-layer propagator is used to take into account the intermediate shielding sheet, and it is found that the presence of the sheet enhances the quantum pressure by two orders of magnitude. As an example of implication, we show that in both the standard chameleon and symmetron models, large and previously unconstrained regions of the parameter space are excluded once the quantum pressure is taken into account.

• Received 19 October 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.99.104049

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