Comment on "Search for a substance-dependent force with a new differential accelerometer"

A well-balanced hollow copper sphere freely floating and almost totally submerged in water is observed to move toward the nearby edge of a cliff'. This observation is consistent with a substance-dependent, medium-range force postulated in a recent reanalysis of the Eotvos experiment. Further measurements with difTerent elements and geometries will be required to establish definitely the existence , source, and description of such a new force. Precise studies, performed over many years, ' of the gravitational acceleration as a function of depth in mines have persistently suggested the presence of a small, non-Newtonian, medium-range repulsive component of the field. This component has been written as a Yukawa term in which case the potential energy of two masses m and m ' separated by a distance r is V = — G (mm '/r) (1+ae "), where G is tht: gravitational constant for r))X. The best values' of the constants are a = — 8x10 and k = 200 m, with this last value being very uncertain. Recently it was suggested that the non-Newtonian term, rather than being part of the gravitational field, may be due to a hitherto-unknown medium-range baryon-baryon interaction. This assumption uncovers and explains a significant correlation in the old Eotvos torsion-balance data and also provides a possible interpretation of recent anomalous results in the K-K sys-0 0 tern. It was further shown that, for medium-range forces, local terrain inhomogeneities become the determining factor for the interpretation of the Eotvos results and that repeating such experiments in the vicinity of a large inhomogeneity such as a cliA' would afford the highest sensitivity. A differential accelerometer has been developed which measures horizontal motions of a hollow copper sphere freely floating in water, and is sensitive to small differences in acceleration between the solid and the liquid. When multipole gravitational interactions can be neglected, a difference in acceleration will still arise if the above-mentioned baryon-baryon interaction exists, because the baryon-number-(hypercharge-) to-mass ratios differ for Cu and H20. The horizontal component of this acceleration difference can be written as Aa =A(B/p) ~ y ~ cos9, ~here y is the presumed hypercharge force field, B the baryon numbers for the floating object and the displaced liquid, p the corresponding masses expressed in atomic mass units, and 0 the angle between y and the horizontal (0= 45 at the edge of a vertical cliff of height »X). This horizontal acceleration can be determined …