Runaway dilaton and equivalence principle violations.
In a recently proposed scenario, where the dilaton decouples while cosmologically attracted towards infinite bare string coupling, its residual interactions can be related to the amplitude of density fluctuations generated during inflation, and are large enough to be detectable through a modest improvement on present tests of free-fall universality. Provided it has significant couplings to either dark matter or dark energy, a runaway dilaton can also induce time variations of the natural "constants" within the reach of near-future experiments.
Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, 35 route de Chartres, F-91440 Bures-sur-Yvette, France.
Thibault
T
Damour
Federico
F
Piazza
Gabriele
G
Veneziano