MG14 - Talk detail

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The weak equivalence principle constitutes one of the cornerstones of general relativity and already has experimentally been verified to a high degree of accuracy. Nevertheless, the corresponding equality between inertial and gravitational masses is remarkable. It can be elucidated by the well-known derivation of general relativity as a gauge theory of translations. While in conventional Yang-Mills theories the relevant coupling constants appear as a priori unknown parameters of internal gauge connections they do not appear within the external translational gauge connection since the notion of translation is universal to all test particles. Therefore, in the framework of general relativity as a gauge theory of translations, the missing internal gauge freedom leads to the absence of an explicit gravitational coupling constant but rather the coupling to space-time geometry is introduced by external gauge freedom in a natural way. As a consequence, the validity of the weak equivalence principle is tied to the validity of local translation invariance, such that related experimental tests, that, e.g., are based on energy conservation, are conceivable.

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