  Satellite galaxies currently undergoing tidal disruption offer a unique
opportunity to constrain an effective violation of the equivalence principle in
the dark sector. Theories in which cold dark matter (CDM) couples to a light
scalar field naturally lead to a long-range force between dark matter
particles. An inverse-square-law force of this kind would manifest itself as a
violation of the equivalence principle in the dynamics of CDM compared to
baryons in the form of gas or stars. In a previous paper, we showed that an
attractive force would displace stars outwards from the bottom of the
satellite's gravitational potential well, leading to a higher fraction of stars
being disrupted from the tidal bulge further from the Galactic center. Since
stars disrupted from the far (near) side of the satellite go on to form the
trailing (leading) tidal stream, an attractive dark-matter force will produce a
relative enhancement of the trailing stream compared to the leading stream.
This distinctive signature of a dark-matter force might be detected through
detailed observations of the tidal tails of a disrupting satellite, such as
those recently performed by the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) and Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) on the Sagittarius (Sgr) dwarf galaxy. Here we show
that this signature is robust to changes in our models for both the satellite
and Milky Way, suggesting that we might hope to search for a dark-matter force
in the tidal features of other recently discovered satellite galaxies in
addition to the Sgr dwarf.
