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Testing the Strong Equivalence Principle in strong field regimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

Norbert Wex
Norbert Wex*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Society, Research Unit “Theory of Gravitation”, at theUniversity of Jena, Max-Wien-Platz 1, D-07743 Jena, Germany

Extract

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A possible functional dependence of the ratio of ‘gravitational’ mass mG and ‘inertial’ mass mI on the gravitational self-energy EG,

is called a violation of the Strong Equivalence Principle (SEP).

Weakly self-gravitating bodies are found in the solar system where lunarlaser-ranging data restrict the Nordtvedt parameter η to absolute values smaller than 0.001, (Dickey et al. 1994, Müller et al. 1995). To test higher order contributions one needs to consider strongly self-gravitating bodies such as neutron-stars.

Small-eccentricity binary-star systems consisting of a neutron star (|EG|/mc2 ~ 0.15) and a white dwarf (|EG|/mc2 ~ 10−4) are excellent ‘laboratories’ to test the SEP in a strong-field regime. As shown by Damour and Schäfer (1991) a violation of the SEP would lead to a periodic change in the eccentricity of the orbit of the binary pulsar caused by the galactic acceleration. Thus the observation of old small-eccentricity long-orbital-period neutron-star white-dwarf binary systems put (with a certain confidence level) a limit on the violation of the SEP.

Type
Part 2 Precision Measurements
Information
International Astronomical Union Colloquium , Volume 160: Pulsars: Problems and Progress , 1996 , pp. 123 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of the Pacific 1996

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