Jay Tasson Abstract

Jay Tasson
Carleton

Falling-Atom Tests of Relativity

Over the past several decades, an impressive number of new high-sensitivity tests of Lorentz symmetry have been performed with the goal of gaining clues about physics at the Planck Scale. The progress was spurred by the development of an effective field theory known as the Standard-Model Extension (SME), which contains known physics along with arbitrary coordinate-independent Lorentz violation. The SME provides a comprehensive test framework in which experiments testing Lorentz symmetry are analyzed and compared. A large number of experiments in this new generation of tests have involved atomic physics, and recent investigations of Lorentz symmetry in a gravitational context have further broadened the list of interesting atomic physics tests. In this talk I will provide an overview of Lorentz-symmetry testing in the context of the SME, and focus specifically on recent atomic-physics related advances.