A Laboratory Search for Dark Energy

Abstract

The discovery of the accelerating universe indicates strongly the presence of a scalar field which is not only expected to solve today's version of the cosmological constant problem, or the fine-tuning and the coincidence problems, but also provides a way to understand dark energy. It has also been shown that Jordan's scalar-tensor theory is now going to be re-discovered in the new lights. In this letter we suggest a way to search for the extremely light scalar field by means of a laboratory experiment on the low-energy photon-photon interactions with the quasi-parallel incident beams.

10 pages, 2 figures