Kalaydzhyan Tigran
Department of Physics, University of Illinois, Chicago, Illinois 60607-7059, USA.
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
Sci Rep. 2016 Jul 27;6:30461. doi: 10.1038/srep30461.
General relativity(GR) is the current description of gravity in modern physics. One of the cornerstones of GR, as well as Newton's theory of gravity, is the weak equivalence principle (WEP), stating that the trajectory of a freely falling test body is independent of its internal structure and composition. WEP is known to be valid for the normal matter with a high precision. However, due to the rarity of antimatter and weakness of the gravitational forces, the WEP has never been confirmed for antimatter. The current direct bounds on the ratio between the gravitational and inertial masses of the antihydrogen do not rule out a repulsive nature for the antimatter gravity. Here we establish an indirect bound of 0.13% on the difference between the gravitational and inertial masses of the positron (antielectron) from the analysis of synchrotron losses at the Large Electron-Positron collider (LEP). This serves as a confirmation of the conventional gravitational properties of antimatter without common assumptions such as, e.g., coupling of gravity to virtual particles, dynamics of distant astrophysical sources and the nature of absolute gravitational potentials.
广义相对论(GR)是现代物理学中对引力的当前描述。广义相对论以及牛顿引力理论的基石之一是弱等效原理(WEP),该原理指出自由下落测试物体的轨迹与其内部结构和组成无关。众所周知,弱等效原理对于正常物质具有高精度的有效性。然而,由于反物质的稀缺性和引力的微弱性,弱等效原理从未在反物质上得到证实。目前关于反氢引力质量与惯性质量之比的直接界限并不排除反物质引力具有排斥性质。在此,我们通过对大型正负电子对撞机(LEP)同步辐射损失的分析,建立了正电子(反电子)引力质量与惯性质量之差的间接界限为0.13%。这证实了反物质具有传统引力特性,而无需诸如引力与虚粒子耦合、遥远天体物理源的动力学以及绝对引力势的性质等常见假设。