Experimental design for testing local Lorentz invariance violation in gravity

Abstract

Local Lorentz invariance is an important foundation of General Relativity, and its high-precision testing can help to explore the unified theories. In this work, we focus on the local Lorentz violating effect in pure gravity with mass dimension d = 6, and study the experimental design for testing local Lorentz violation with precision torsion pendulum experiments. By designing the striped test and source masses, and setting the appropriate azimuth angles of the experimental setup, we found the constraint accuracy of the local Lorentz violation coefficients is expected to be improved by one to two orders of magnitude compared with the international optimal level. Moreover, considering the difficulty level of changing the azimuth angle of the experimental setup in practical experiments, we proposed two experimental strategies and separately studied the azimuth-angle configurations corresponding to the optimal constraint of the local Lorentz violating coefficients, which can guide the development of the later experiments.