Background-Induced Forces from Dark Relics

Light particles quadratically coupled to nucleons induce macroscopic forces in matter. While a quantum effect always exists, an additional force occurs in the presence of a finite density of the light particles. We compute and classify such background-induced forces for particles of spin $0,\frac{1}{2},1$ in the framework of effective field theory. We show that, at short distance, the background-induced forces exhibit a universal behavior that depends solely on the moments of the phase space distribution function of the light particles. We compute the forces in the case of dark particles densities that may realistically occur in cosmology, assuming either cosmically homogeneous or virialized phase space distributions. For homogeneous distributions -- analogous to cosmic neutrinos, all the background-induced forces remain, unlike the quantum ones, exponentially unsuppressed at large distance, implying that large scale fifth force experiments are highly sensitive to dark relics. Moreover at zero mass the forces from dark bosons are generically enhanced with respect to their quantum counterpart due to Bose-Einstein distribution. Overall, we find that the resulting fifth force bounds can compete with those from quantum forces. For virialized distributions -- identifiable as cold dark matter, the reach is also enhanced beyond the dark matter Compton wavelength. We obtain significant bounds on sub-keV scalar cold dark matter, that can appear in certain cosmological scenarios. A thorough adaptation of the results from the E\"ot-Wash experiment may produce powerful additional bounds.