Paper detail

Testing Chern-Simons modified gravity with orbiting superconductive gravity gradiometers --- The non-dynamical formulation

High precision Superconductivity Gravity Gradiometers (SGG) are powerful tools for relativistic experiments. In this paper, we work out the tidal signals in non-dynamical Chern-Simons modified gravity, which could be measured by orbiting SGGs around Earth. We find that, with proper orientations of multi-axes SGGs, the tidal signals from the Chern-Simons modification can be isolated in the combined data of different axes. Furthermore, for three-axes SGGs, such combined data is the trace of the total tidal matrix, which is invariant under the rotations of SGG axes and thus free from axis pointing errors. Following nearly circular orbits, the tests of the parity-violating Chern-Simons modification and the measurements of the gravitomagnetic sector in parity-conserving metric theories can be carried out independently in the same time. A first step analysis on noise sources is also included.