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Testing General Relativity and Measuring Geopotential Beyond the State-of-theArt with Optical Clocks

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Testing General Relativity and Measuring Geopotential Beyond the State-of-theArt with Optical Clocks

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  • Author: Andrew Ludlow, Laura Sinclair, Nathan Newbury
General relativity prescribes that clocks in different gravitational reference frames tick at different rates, i.e. the gravitational redshift. In recent years, the performance of optical clocks, and optical time transfer techniques for linking clocks, have advanced to an exciting level [1,4]. In tandem with the ability to operate these systems outside the laboratory [2,3], they can now be used to carry out the most stringent tests to-date of the gravitational redshift, and in so doing search for new physics as predicted by unification models. Furthermore, through the redshift, they can measure differences in the gravitational potential at discrete locations at a level beyond state-of-the-art geodetic techniques. Here we will carry out beyond-state-of-the-art redshift tests and relativistic geodesy using a portable optical lattice clock and comb-based optical two-way time-frequency transfer [4].

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