Axion homeopathy: screening dilaton interactions

Cosmologically active Brans-Dicke (or dilaton) scalar fields are generically ruled out by solar system tests of gravity unless their couplings to ordinary matter are much suppressed relative to gravitational strength, and this is a major hindrance when building realistic models of light dilatons coupled to matter. We propose a new mechanism for evading such bounds if matter also couples to a light axion, that exploits nonlinear target-space …