Effective interactions in Ricci-Based Gravity models below the non-metricity scale

We show how minimally-coupled matter fields of arbitrary spin, when coupled to Ricci-Based Gravity theories, develop non-trivial effective interactions that can be treated perturbatively only below a characteristic high-energy scale $\Lambda_Q$. Our results generalize to arbitrary matter fields those recently obtained for spin 1/2 fields in \cite{Latorre:2017uve}. We then use this interactions to set bounds on the high-energy scale $\Lambda_Q$ that controls departures of Ricci-Based Gravity theories from General Relativity. Particularly, for Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity we obtain the strong bound $|\kappa|<3.5 \times 10^{-14} \text{ m}^5 \text{kg}^{-1}\text{s}^{-2}$.