This white paper is submitted as part of Snowmass2013 (subgroup CF2). The extraordinary sensitivity of torsion-balances can be used to search for the ultra-feeble forces suggested by attempts to unify gravity with the other fundamental interactions.
The motivation, the results and their implications as well as the future prospects of this work are summarized. The experiments include tests of the universality of free fall (weak equivalence principle), probes of the short-distance behavior of gravity (inverse-square law tests for extra dimensions and exchange forces from new meV scale bosons), and Planck-scale tests of Lorentz invariance (preferred-frame effects, non-commutative geometries).
We show that a previous polarized 3He experiment at Princeton, plus Eot-Wash equivalence-principle tests, constrain exotic, long-ranged (lambda > 0.15m) parity-violating interactions of neutrons at levels well below those inferred from a recent study
of the parity-violating spin-precession of neutrons transmitted through liquid 4He. For lambda > 1.0e8 meters the bounds on gAgV are improved by a 11 orders of magnitude.
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 $10^{13}$ 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.
We used a torsion pendulum containing $approx 10^{23}$ polarized electrons to search new interactions that couple to electron spin. We limit CP-violating interactions between the pendulums electrons and unpolarized matter in the earth or the sun, tes
t for rotation and boost-dependent preferred-frame effects using the earths rotation and velocity with respect to the entire cosmos, and search for exotic velocity-dependent potentials between polarized electrons and unpolarized matter in the sun and moon. Finally, we find that the gravitational mass of an electron spinning toward the galactic center differs by less than about 1 part in $10^{21}$ from an electron spinning in the opposite direction. As a byproduct of this work, the density of polarized electrons in Sm$ $Co$_5$ was measured to be $(4.19pm 0.19)times 10^{22} {rm cm}^{-3}$ at a field of 9.6 kG.
