Talk detail

Participant	Armano, Michele
Institution	European Space Agency - ESAC, Camino Bajo del Castillo s/n - Villanueva de la Canada - Madrid - Spain

Session	SG3	Accepted		Order	Time
Talk	Oral abstract	Title	Test of alternative theories of gravity with LISA Pathfinder
Co-authors
Abstract	Originally designed as a technology precursor for the LISA mission, envisioning both hardware and controls tests in view of the larger gravity waves observatory to follow, LISA Pathfinder (LPF) shows a scientific face with a remarkable richness of features (some of which it was not initially designed for). The gradiometer sensitivity of the device makes it the ideal tool to explore gravity as a Newtonian phenomenon and beyond: LPF stands the chance of performing acceleration gradients measurements with multiple fly-by's in the neighborhood of the saddle point between the Sun and the Earth, in search for evidence of modifications of the Poisson law in a low-acceleration and low-speed environment. The measurement could rule out theories with scaling functions on the physical acceleration and anyhow widely reduce the parameter space of similar theories. We'll report on the science case and on the measurement and operations scenario.