Ellipticity Weakens Chameleon Screening

Abstract

The chameleon mechanism enables a long range fifth force to be screened in dense environments when non-trivial self interactions of the field cause its mass to increase with the local density. To date, chameleon fifth forces have mainly been studied for spherically symmetric sources, however the non-linear self interactions mean that the chameleon responds to changes in the shape of the source differently to gravity. In this work we focus on ellipsoidal departures from spherical symmetry and compute the full form of the chameleon force, comparing it's shape dependence to that of gravity. Enhancement of the chameleon force by up to 40% is possible when deforming a sphere to an ellipsoid of the same mass, with an ellipticity $\simeq 0.99$.