Description:

Title: Testing gravity on accelerators

Speaker: Tigran Kalaydzhyan, CALTECH
 

Abstract: Weak equivalence principle (WEP) is one of the cornerstones of the
modern theories of gravity, stating that the trajectory of a freely
falling test body is independent of its internal structure and
composition. Even though WEP is known to be valid for the usual
matter, it has never been experimentally confirmed for antimatter and
relativistic matter. We make an attempt to constrain possible
deviations from WEP utilizing the modern accelerator technologies. We
analyze the (absence of) vacuum Cherenkov radiation, photon decay and
anomalous synchrotron losses at the Large Electron-Positron Collider
(LEP) and at Tevatron to put limits on a difference between the
gravitational and inertial masses of the relativistic
electrons/positrons. Our main result is the 0.1% upper limit on the
mentioned difference. I will further explain how this figure can be
improved with the analysis of a high-energy Compton scattering at the
future International Linear Collider (ILC). The talk is based on the
following publications,

T.K., Sci. Rep. 6 (2016) 30461
T.K., Phys. Lett. B751 (2015) 29
T.K., Phys. Lett. B750 (2015) 112
T.K., Phys. Rev. Lett. 116 (2016) 209001

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, HEP