Phillips David F, Ravi Aakash, Ebadi Reza, Walsworth Ronald L
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Quantum Technology Center, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2021 Apr 9;126(14):141103. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141103.
The temporal stability of millisecond pulsars is remarkable, rivaling even some terrestrial atomic clocks at long timescales. Using this property, we show that millisecond pulsars distributed in the galactic neighborhood form an ensemble of accelerometers from which we can directly extract the local galactic acceleration. From pulsar spin period measurements, we demonstrate acceleration sensitivity with about 1σ precision using 117 pulsars. We also present a complementary analysis using orbital periods of 13 binary pulsar systems that eliminates the systematics associated with pulsar braking and results in a local acceleration of (1.7±0.5)×10^{-10} m/s^{2} in good agreement with expectations. This work is a first step toward dynamically measuring acceleration gradients that will eventually inform us about the dark matter density distribution in the Milky Way galaxy.
毫秒脉冲星的时间稳定性非常显著，在长时间尺度上甚至可与一些地面原子钟相媲美。利用这一特性，我们表明分布在银河系附近的毫秒脉冲星构成了一个加速度计集合，从中我们可以直接提取当地的银河系加速度。通过脉冲星自旋周期测量，我们使用117颗脉冲星展示了约1σ精度的加速度灵敏度。我们还使用13个双脉冲星系统的轨道周期进行了补充分析，消除了与脉冲星制动相关的系统误差，得到了(1.7±0.5)×10^{-10} m/s^{2}的当地加速度，与预期结果吻合良好。这项工作是朝着动态测量加速度梯度迈出的第一步，最终将为我们提供有关银河系暗物质密度分布的信息。
