Title: Probing gravity and its fundamental properties with radio pulsars
Speaker: Paulo C. C. Freire (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie)
Date: March 10 at 14:30
Location: R521, General Building II
Abstract:
Over the last few years, a set of new results from pulsar timing has not only introduced some of the most precise tests of general relativity (GR) carried out to date, but have also introduced much tighter constraints on violations of the strong equivalence principle (SEP), a fundamental physical principle that is embodied by GR. This was done via a direct verification of the universality of free fall for a pulsar in a triple star system and with tests of the nature of gravitational waves, in particular a search for dipolar gravitational wave emission in a variety of binary pulsars. No deviations from the SEP have been detected in our experiments. These results introduce some of the most stringent tests of GR and introduce the tightest constraints on several classes of alternative theories of gravity and complement recent results from the ground-based gravitational wave detectors.
