Advance and prospects in constraining the Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity from the Casimir effect

Abstract

We report stronger constraints on the parameters of Yukawa-type corrections to Newtonian gravity from measurements of the lateral Casimir force between sinusoidally corrugated surfaces of a sphere and a plate. In the interaction range from 1.6 to 14 nm the strengthening of previously known high confidence constraints up to a factor of $2.4\times 10^7$ is achieved using these measurements. It is shown that the replacement of a plane plate with a corrugated one in the measurements of the normal Casimir force by means of an atomic force microscope would result in the strengthening of respective high confidence constraints on the Yukawa-type interaction by a factor of $1.1\times 10^{12}$. The use of a corrugated plate instead of a plane plate in the experiment by means of a micromachined oscillator also leads to strengthening of the obtained constraints. We further obtain constraints on the parameters of Yukawa-type interaction from the data of experiments measuring the gradient of the Casimir pressure between two parallel plates and the gradient of the Casimir-Polder force between an atom and a plate. The obtained results are compared with the previously known constraints. The possibilities of how to further strengthen the constraints on non-Newtonian gravity are discussed.