According to the Weak Equivalence Principle, all bodies should fall at the same rate in a gravitational field. The MICROSCOPE satellite, launched in April 2016, aims to test its validity at the 10 −15 precision level, by measuring the force required to maintain two test masses (of titanium and platinum alloys) exactly in the same orbit. A non-vanishing result would correspond to a violation of the Equivalence Principle, or to the discovery of a new long-range force. Analysis of the first data gives δ(Ti, Pt) = [−1±9(stat)±9(syst)]×10−15 (1σ statistical uncertainty) for the titanium-platinum Eötvös parameter characterizing the relative difference in their free-fall accelerations.

The existence of a light or massive scalar field with a coupling to matter weaker than gravitational strength is a possible source of violation of the weak equivalence principle. We use the first results on the Eötvös parameter by the MICROSCOPE experiment to set new constraints on such scalar fields. For a massive scalar field of mass smaller than 10^{-12}  eV (i.e., range larger than a few 10^{5}  m), we improve existing constraints by one order of magnitude to |α|<10^{-11} if the scalar field couples to the baryon number and to |α|<10^{-12} if the scalar field couples to the difference between the baryon and the lepton numbers. We also consider a model describing the coupling of a generic dilaton to the standard matter fields with five parameters, for a light field: We find that, for masses smaller than 10^{-12}  eV, the constraints on the dilaton coupling parameters are improved by one order of magnitude compared to previous equivalence principle tests.