The Science Case for STEP physics步进物理科学.ucla.pptVIP

The Science Case for STEP The equivalence principle Testing equivalence STEP concept Discovery potential Crisis and unification in physics What to drop? What might STEP find? Importance of a null result A win-win experiment Complementarity Summary James Overduin (Gravity Probe B, Stanford University and Maryland Space Grant Consortium, Johns Hopkins University) Quantum to Cosmos 3, Airlie Center, 8 July 2008 (Satellite Test of the Equivalence Principle) Einsteins “happiest thought” (1907): the effects of gravity can be locally “transformed away” by accelerating along with the test body I.e., gravitation = acceleration Gravity on earth---or acceleration in space Falling on earth--- or floating in space But is this equation exact? Is gravity perfectly geometrical? Implication: gravity is a property of spacetime, not matter (Einstein identified the relevant property of spacetime as its curvature) Holds regardless of the mass or composition of the test body (not true for any other forces, e.g. magnetism) Test by dropping different kinds of test materials in same gravitational field 400 years of testing have established that Galileo (1610) Roll, Krotkov Dicke (1964) E?t-Wash (Adelberger et al., 1990) LLR (Williams et al., 1996) 10 -18 STEP STEP will improve this by 5 orders of magnitude to Simon Stevin (1586) Newton (1686) Bessel (1832) E?tv?s (1922) Remember this range Essentially an orbiting version of Galileos “drop-tower” experiment More time for separation to build, and signal is periodic Inherits key technologies from Gravity Probe B: drag-free control, cryogenic SQUID readout, electrostatic positioning system, others Larger driving acceleration and quieter “seismic” environment allow for improvement of 5-6 orders of magnitude over terrestrial tests Human progress Science technology Physics (Theorists view - not to scale) covariance General Equivalence principle STEP STEP tests the foundation---not a prediction---of Einsteins theory of