Pulsar Tests of Gravitational Lorentz Violation

Abstract

Pulsars are precision celestial clocks. When being put in a binary, the ticking conveys the secret of underlying spacetime geometrodynamics. We use pulsars to test if the gravitational interaction possesses a tiny deviation from Einstein's General Relativity (GR). In the framework of Standard-Model Extension (SME), we systematically search for Lorentz-violating operators cataloged by (a) the minimal couplings of mass dimension 4, (b) the CPT symmetry of mass dimension 5, and (c) the gravitational weak equivalence principle (GWEP) of mass dimension 8. No deviation from GR was found yet.