Berlin 2005 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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GR: Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie
GR 18: Postersitzung
GR 18.6: Poster
Freitag, 4. März 2005, 14:00–19:00, Poster TU BH
Testing Lorentz invariance with matter filled cavity oscillators — •Holger Müller — Physics Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, email: holgerm@stanford.edu
We consider the use of matter filled cavities for tests of Lorentz invariance in the framework of the standard model extension. The influence of Lorentz violation on the speed of light c along the cavity axis, the cavity length L as defined by a solid, and the index of refraction n combine to a shift δ ν of the cavity’s resonance frequency ν=mc/(2nL) (where m is a constant mode number). A test of Lorentz violation would search for such shifts connected to Lorentz boosts or rotations of the cavity (e.g., due to Earth’s rotation).
Compared to vacuum cavities, the change in n makes such experiments sensitive to additional Lorentz violation coefficients from the photon and fermion sector. Moreover, a large index of refraction is found to enhance its own sensitivity to the coefficients. Thus, matter filled cavities offer the possibility to obtain sharper and/or more detailed bounds on Lorentz violation. From experiments that have already been performed, we derive the first bounds on some electron coefficients and improved bounds on photon and electron coefficients. The bounds for several of them are below 10−15. We also discuss how these bounds may be further improved in dedicated experiments and using optimized materials.