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Register a new userTesting General Relativity
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Angelo Tartaglia
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This lecture will present a review of the past and present tests of the General Relativity theory. The essentials of the theory will be recalled and the measurable effects will be listed and analyzed. The main historical confirmations of General Relativity will be described. Then, the present situation will be reviewed presenting a number of examples. The opportunities given by astrophysical and astrometric observations will be shortly discussed. Coming to terrestrial experiments the attention will be specially focused on ringlasers and a dedicated experiment for the Gran Sasso Laboratories, named by the acronym GINGER, will be presented. Mention will also be made of alternatives to the use of light, such as particle beams and superfluid rings.
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Gravitational-wave sources offer us unique testbeds for probing strong-field, dynamical and nonlinear aspects of gravity. In this chapter, we give a brief overview of the current status and future prospects of testing General Relativity with gravitational waves. In particular, we focus on three theory-agnostic tests (parameterized tests, inspiral-merger-ringdown consistency tests, and gravitational-wave propagation tests) and explain how one can apply such tests to example modified theories of gravity. We conclude by giving some open questions that need to be resolved to carry out more accurate tests of gravity with gravitational waves.
The paper discusses the optimal conguration of one or more ring lasers to be used for measuring the general relativistic effects of the rotation of the earth, as manifested on the surface of the planet. The analysis is focused on devices having their normal vector lying in the meridian plane. The crucial role of the evaluation of the angles is evidenced. Special attention is paid to the orientation at the maximum signal, minimizing the sensitivity to the orientation uncertainty. The use of rings at different latitudes is mentioned and the problem of the non-sfericity of the earth is commented.
Electron accelerations of the order of $10^{21} g$ obtained by laser fields open up the possibility of experimentally testing one of the cornerstones of general relativity, the weak equivalence principle, which states that the local effects of a gravitational field are indistinguishable from those sensed by a properly accelerated observer in flat space-time. We illustrate how this can be done by solving the Einstein equations in vacuum and integrating the geodesic equations of motion for a uniformly accelerated particle.
The observations of gravitational-wave signals from astrophysical sources such as binary inspirals will be used to test General Relativity for self consistency and against alternative theories of gravity. I describe a simple formula that can be used to characterize the prospects of such tests, by estimating the matched-filtering signal-to-noise ratio required to detect non-General-Relativistic corrections of a given magnitude. The formula is valid for sufficiently strong signals; it requires the computation of a single number, the fitting factor between the General-Relativistic and corrected waveform families; and it can be applied to all tests that embed General Relativity in a larger theory, including tests of individual theories such as Brans-Dicke gravity, as well as the phenomenological schemes that introduce corrections and extra terms in the post-Newtonian phasing expressions of inspiral waveforms. The formula suggests that the volume-limited gravitational-wave searches performed with second-generation ground-based detectors would detect alternative-gravity corrections to General-Relativistic waveforms no smaller than 1-10% (corresponding to fitting factors of 0.9 to 0.99).
One century after its formulation, Einsteins general relativity has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are theoretical and experimental reasons to believe that general relativity should be modified when gravitational fields are strong and spacetime curvature is large. The best astrophysical laboratories to probe strong-field gravity are black holes and neutron stars, whether isolated or in binary systems. We review the motivations to consider extensions of general relativity. We present a (necessarily incomplete) catalog of modified theories of gravity for which strong-field predictions have been computed and contrasted to Einsteins theory, and we summarize our current understanding of the structure and dynamics of compact objects in these theories. We discuss current bounds on modified gravity from binary pulsar and cosmological observations, and we highlight the potential of future gravitational wave measurements to inform us on the behavior of gravity in the strong-field regime.
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