Past exam of the relativity course of the University of Cambridge / 2017 / 2

The three classic tests probe orbital motion, the propagation of light, and clock rates in a gravitational field.

Schwarzschild perihelion precession. For an orbit with semi-major axis $a$ and orbital eccentricity $e$, the leading advance per revolution isThe relevant observation for Mercury is the residual advance after the much larger ordinary perturbations have been included, approximately $43$ arcseconds per century.^[ref] An orbital fit must account for the other planets and reference-frame effects before interpreting that residual as a relativistic contribution.

Schwarzschild light deflection. A ray with large impact parameter $b$ passing a nearly spherical mass is deflected throughAt the Sun's limb this is about $1.75$ arcseconds. The Eddington experiment used the 1919 solar eclipse to photograph background stars near the obscured Sun, then compared their positions with reference photographs. The measured effect is an apparent outward displacement of the background stars, not a direct photograph of a curved light path. Telescope focus, plate scale and atmospheric effects must be controlled when extracting such small shifts.^[ref]

Gravitational redshift. For a photon emitted lower in a weak static field and received a height $H$ above it,The Pound-Rebka experiment used the narrow recoil-free nuclear resonance supplied by the Mössbauer effect. A controlled source motion supplies a small Doppler shift that compensates the gravitational shift, allowing a change in resonant absorption to reveal it across a laboratory tower.^[ref] The leading weak-field redshift follows from the equivalence principle and therefore does not, by itself, distinguish every competing metric theory of gravity.

Nearby freely falling particles can accelerate relative to one another even though each follows a geodesic. A local inertial frame removes the common gravitational acceleration at one event; it cannot remove the variation across an extended laboratory. That variation is a tidal force, measured covariantly by geodesic deviation.

Let $u^{\mu }$ be the reference four-velocity and ${\xi }^{\mu }$ an infinitesimal separation to a neighboring geodesic, with matching affine parameters. With the convention $[{\nabla }_{\beta },{\nabla }_{\gamma }]V^{\mu }=R^{\mu }{}_{\nu \beta \gamma }{V}^{\nu }$,This relates measured relative acceleration to the Riemann curvature tensor. Reversing the curvature-tensor convention reverses the displayed curvature sign, without changing the physical relative motion.

In a small freely falling frame outside a spherical mass, the weak-field tidal tensor has radial and transverse components proportional to $2,-1,-1$. ThusAn initially spherical cloud stretches radially and compresses in both transverse directions. Two separated test masses, with their changing separation measured by light, form the basic idea of a gravity gradiometer; the common falling motion drops out. A uniform apparent acceleration in an accelerated laboratory can occur even in flat Minkowski spacetime, so it is the separation-dependent tidal response that diagnoses curvature.

Write $r_s=2GM/c^2$ and $f=1-r_s/r$. The Schwarzschild tortoise coordinate satisfies $d{r}_{\ast }/dr=1/f$ and can be chosen as $r_{\ast }=r+r_s\ln |r/r_s-1|$. Define the advanced time $v=t+r_{\ast }/c$. Substituting $dt=dv-dr/(cf)$ into the Schwarzschild metric gives the ingoing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates formThe coefficients are regular at $r=r_s$ and the radial-block determinant is $-c^2$, so the exterior Schwarzschild-time divergence is a coordinate singularity at the future event horizon. The physical curvature singularity at $r=0$ remains.

The two families of radial null trajectories in ingoing Eddington-Finkelstein coordinates obeyOutside the event horizon, the outgoing family increases $r$; at the horizon it generates the horizon itself; inside, even the outgoing future-directed family decreases $r$. An infaller crosses the future horizon at finite $v$ and finite proper time. The chart makes this causal geometry visible without mistaking Schwarzschild coordinate time for the infaller's clock.