Torsion-balance tests of the weak equivalence principle

By T. A. Wagner, Stephan Schlamminger, J. Gundlach, E. Adelberger. 2012

467 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We briefly summarize motivations for testing the weak equivalence principle and then review recent torsion-balance results that compare the differential accelerations of beryllium–aluminum and beryllium–titanium test-body pairs with precisions at the part in 1013 level. We discuss some implications of these results for the gravitational properties of antimatter and dark matter and speculate about the prospects for further improvements in experimental sensitivity.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7ce1140a8dd0cef41527afbcaea2a01a2fb0336

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Citations in the corpus

General Relativity and Cosmology: Unsolved Questions and Future Directions (2016, background): “Mass equivalence Galileo [366,473] Eöt-Wash Group [371] Confirmed Eötvös [367] Lunar Laser Ranging [343] MICROSCOPE[474] STEP [475] Galileo Galilei satellite [476]”
Particle physics models for the 17 MeV anomaly in beryllium nuclear decays (2016, background): “However, equivalence principle constraints on new, massless gauge bosons that can couple to the constituents of ordinary matter are severe [114,127,128].”
de Sitter swampland conjecture and the Higgs potential (2018, methodology): “We will focus here on high-precision tests of the equivalence principle, summarized in [49].”
Search for New Physics with Atoms and Molecules (2017, methodology): “The “Eöt-Wash” torsion-balance experiments tested WEP to 10−13 by comparing differential accelerations of beryllium-aluminum and beryllium-titanium test-body pairs (Schlamminger et al., 2008; Wagner et al., 2012).”
Evidence for a sublattice weak gravity conjecture (2016, background): “For instance, equivalence principle tests tell us that any massless B − L gauge boson must have a coupling eB−L < ∼ 10−24 [53, 54].”
Generalized Uncertainty Principle: Approaches and Applications (2014, background): “The Newtonian mechanics in a gravitational field is conjectured to fulfil the WEP effects [66, 293].”
Beyond the Cosmological Standard Model (2014, unknown): “The best limit on η comes from torsion balance experiments at the University of Washington (Eöt-Wash), which give η < 2× 10−13 [835, 836].”
Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor (MAGIS-100) (2021, unknown): “The gray shaded regions show bounds from equivalence principle tests using torsion pendula (EP) [14, 117] and the MICROSCOPE satellite experiment [116].”