Jena 2013 – scientific programme

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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 6: Klassische Allgemeine Relativitästheorie I

GR 6.3: Talk

Tuesday, February 26, 2013, 18:45–19:00, HS 6

Local spacetime effects on gyroscope systems — •Christian Pfeifer and Mattias Wohlfarth — Universitaet Hamburg, II Institut fuer theoretische Physik, Hamburg, Deutschland

Guided by the question what exactly is meant when people talk about a rotating spacetime I investigate the transport of initially aligned gyroscopes along different paths, between some initial and final point in spacetime. It turns out that the gyroscopes loose their alignment due to the curvature of spacetime and their relative motion. Sets of aligned gyroscopes can be used to synchronize spatial frames of observers, hence their desynchronization gives rise to a relative rotation of observers. As application we use our findings for a class of observers in Kerr spacetime and suggest a local experiment how these observers are able to determine if their spacetime is described rather by a rotating Kerr or non-rotating Schwarzschild metric.