Abstract
Local Lorentz invariance (LLI) is one of the most important fundamental symmetries in modern physics. While the possibility of LLI violation (LLIv) was studied extensively in flat spacetime, its counterpart in gravitational interaction also deserves significant examination from experiments. In this contribution, I review several recent studies of LLI in post-Newtonian gravity, using powerful tools of pulsar timing. It shows that precision pulsar timing experiments hold a unique position to probe LLIv in post-Newtonian gravity.
Highlights
In 1905, one of Einstein’s annus mirabilis papers—“On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”(in German, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper”)—permanently established the Lorentzian nature of a flat spacetime in special relativity, and it was later extended by Einstein himself to general relativity (GR) locally
local Lorentz invariance (LLI) is an important concept of modern physics that deserves the most stringent examination from experiments
LLI violation (LLIv) in the gravitational interaction, which is an important ingredient of the strong equivalence principle [2], is relatively harder to be studied than its flat-spacetime counterpart, because of the intrinsic weakness of gravitation
Summary
In 1905, one of Einstein’s annus mirabilis papers—“On the electrodynamics of moving bodies”. Lorentzian transformation property of gravitation, and leads to various anomalous phenomena in gravitational experiments [2,3,7,8,9,10,11], including lunar laser ranging [12,13], atom interferometry [14], pulsar timing [15,16,17,18,19], cosmic rays [20,21], very long baseline interferometry [22], and short-range experiments in laboratory [23,24,25,26] In this short contribution, I will focus on the recent limits on LLIv obtained from precision pulsar timing experiments [7,15,16,17,18,19,27,28] in the theoretical frameworks of parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) gravity [2,29] and the pure gravity sector of the standard-model extension (SME) [1,6,7]. Interested readers are encouraged to elaborate reviews for more details [2,3,4,5,30]
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