SHAO Astrophysics Colloquia

Talk delivered in Chinese, with slides in English

Title: Testing Fundamental Physics With Fast Radio Bursts

Speaker: Xuefeng Wu (PMO)

Time: 3 PM, May 12th (Thursday)

Abstract:

The Einstein's weak equivalence principle (WEP) is one of the foundations of general relativity and many other metric theories of gravity. At the post-Newtonian level, the accuracy of the WEP can be tested through the numerical values of the parametrized post-Newtonian (PPN) parameters, such as the parameter γ.  Specifically, the WEP accuracy/violation can be constrained by comparing the γ values for different kinds of particles, or for the same kind of particle with different energies, since all gravity theories satisfying the WEP predict the same γ values for different test particles. On the other hand, the question of whether the photon has a finite rest mass is one of the most important and interesting issues in modern physics, as it is closely related to many fundamental questions such as charge conservation and quantization, and so on. Hence, it is need to push the constraints on the photon mass as far as possible. The most direct method of constraining the photon mass is to detect a possible frequency dependence of the speed of light. In this talk, I will show that both the WEP violation and the rest mass of photon can be well constrained using the time delay of photons with different frequencies arising in extragalactic fast radio bursts (FRBs), which is a new type of millisecond radio burst transients attracting wide attention in the recent years.