Macroscopic Screening of Coulomb Potentials From UV/IR-Mixing

Abstract

We compute the static potential in a non-commutative theory including a term due to UV/IR-mixing. As a result, the potential decays exponentially fast with distance rather than like a power law Coulomb type potential due to the exchange of massless particles. This shows that when quantum effects are taken into account the introduction of non-commutativity not only modifies physics at short distances but has dramatic macroscopic consequences as well. As a result, we give a lower bound on the scale of non-commutativity (if present at all) to be compatible with observations.