Enhanced sensitivity to Lorentz invariance violations in short-range gravity experiments

Abstract

Recently, first limits on putative Lorentz invariance violation coefficients in the pure gravity sector were determined by the reanalysis of short-range gravity experiments. Such experiments search for new physics at sidereal frequencies. They are not, however, designed to optimize the signal strength of a Lorentz invariance violation force; in fact the Lorentz violating signal is suppressed in the planar test mass geometry employed in those experiments. We describe a short-range torsion pendulum experiment with enhanced sensitivity to possible Lorentz violating signals. A periodic, striped test mass geometry is used to augment the signal. Careful arrangement of the phases of the striped patterns on opposite ends of the pendulum further enhances the signal while simultaneously suppressing the Newtonian background.

Searching for local Lorentz invariance violation with pendulum experiments

“…Actually, all these separate analyses for HUST‐2011, IU‐2002, and IU‐2012 experiments have ignored the constraint condition that contributes no effect to Newton force in the short‐range experiments, giving the constraints of 15 LIV coefficients, which have been corrected in the combined analysis, and we finally independently constrained the 14 independent LIV coefficients. Additionally, to design a new experiment enhancing the LIV signal in short‐range experiments, we have further developed a theoretical model for the transfer matrix in a previous work (Shao et al ), which links the nine experimental measurements and the 14 independent LIV coefficients.…”

Signals for Lorentz violation in gravitational waves

“…Tests of Lorentz violation in gravitational waves include searches for birefringence [12] and dispersion [16]. Other tests of Lorentz invariance in the SME gravity sector include those involving gravitationalČerenkov radiation [21], atomic interferometers [24], superconducting gravimeters [25], orbital dynamics [26][27][28][29], short-rangegravity experiments [30,31], comagnetometers [32], nuclear binding energy [33], and very-long-baseline interferometry [34]. The SME also serves as the foundation for a number of theoretical studies of Lorentz violation in gravity [35][36][37][38][39][40].…”

Testing velocity-dependent CPT -violating gravitational forces with radio pulsars

“…Recently, higher-dimensional operators with mass dimension larger than 4 in the gravity sector of SME were investigated, and short-range gravity experiments in laboratory were identified to be the best to constrain these terms due to the extra powers in 1/r for the gravitational forces derived from these operators [22,23,42,43]. However, there is an exception.…”