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We launch a first investigation into how a light scalar field coupled both conformally and disformally to matter influences the evolution of spinning point-like bodies. Working directly at the level of the equations of motion, we derive novel spin-orbit and spin-spin effects accurate to leading order in a nonrelativistic and weak-field expansion. Crucially, unlike the spin-independent effects induced by the disformal coupling, which have been shown to vanish in circular binaries due to rotational symmetry, the spin-dependent effects we study here persist even in the limit of zero eccentricity, and so provide a new and qualitatively distinct way of probing these kinds of interactions. To illustrate their potential, we confront our predictions with spin-precession measurements from the Gravity Probe B experiment and find that the resulting constraint improves upon existing bounds from perihelion precession by over 5 orders of magnitude. Our results therefore establish spin effects as a promising window into the disformally coupled dark sector., Comment: 22 pages + an appendix, 3 figures. v2: Version accepted for publication. Typos in Table 1, Eq. (3.21), and Eq. (3.26) have been corrected

Gravitational waves provide us with a new window into our Universe, and have already been used to place strong constrains on the existence of light scalar fields, which are a common feature in many alternative theories of gravity. However, spin effects are still relatively unexplored in this context. In this work, we construct an effective point-particle action for a generic spinning body that can couple both conformally and disformally to a real scalar field, and we show that requiring the existence of a self-consistent solution automatically implies that if a scalar couples to the mass of a body, then it must also couple to its spin. We then use well-established effective field theory techniques to conduct a comprehensive study of spin-orbit effects in binary systems to leading order in the post-Newtonian (PN) expansion. Focusing on quasicircular nonprecessing binaries for simplicity, we systematically compute all key quantities, including the conservative potential, the orbital binding energy, the radiated power, and the gravitational-wave phase. We show that depending on how strongly each member of the binary couples to the scalar, the spin-orbit effects that are due to a conformal coupling first enter into the phase at either 0.5PN or 1.5PN order, while those that arise from a disformal coupling start at either 3.5PN or 4.5PN order. This suppression by additional PN orders notwithstanding, we find that the disformal spin-orbit terms can actually dominate over their conformal counterparts due to an enhancement by a large prefactor. Accordingly, our results suggest that upcoming gravitational-wave detectors could be sensitive to disformal spin-orbit effects in double neutron star binaries if at least one of the two bodies is sufficiently scalarised., 57 pages + appendices, 8 figures, 5 tables. v2: Version accepted for publication. Some minor clarifications added compared to v1