München 2019 – scientific programme

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GR: Fachverband Gravitation und Relativitätstheorie

GR 1: Classical GR

GR 1.2: Talk

Monday, March 18, 2019, 16:45–17:00, HS 4

Geodetic Concepts in the Framework of General Relativity — •Dennis Philipp — ZARM, Universität Bremen

The description and determination of the Earth's gravity field is one of the central objectives of geodesy. Fundamental geodetic concepts and notions are usually defined within Newtonian gravity and must be reconsidered in General Relativity (GR) to have a theoretical framework that can keep up with ever increasing experimental accuracy. Moreover, in GR the rate of a clock, as compared to some reference, depends on the clock's state of motion and its position in the gravitational field. This is the starting point of chronometric geodesy, an entirely new field that is based on comparing state of the art (optical) atomic clocks.

In my talk, I will introduce the relativistic description of the Earth's geoid, its so-called normal gravity field, and a relativistic height definition. In the (post-)Newtonian limit, well-known results are recovered. To estimate the magnitude of relativistic ``corrections'', the differences to the respective Newtonian notions are calculated to first order.