Gravitational mass of relativistic matter and antimatter

Tigran Kalaydzhyan

Published 2015-06-21Version 1

The universality of free fall, the so-called weak equivalence principle (WEP), is a cornerstone of the general theory of relativity, the most precise theory of gravity confirmed in all experiments up to date. The WEP states the equivalence of the inertial and gravitational masses and was tested in numerous occasions with normal matter at relatively low energies. However, there is no proof for the matter and antimatter at high energies. %coming from ground-based experiments. For the antimatter the situation is even less clear -- current direct observations of trapped antihydrogen suggest the limits -65 < m_g / m < 110 not ruling out antigravity, i.e. repulsion of the antimatter by Earth. Here we demonstrate a bound 1 - 4x10^{-7} < m_g/m < 1 + 2x10^{-7} on the gravitational mass of relativistic electrons and positrons in the potential of the Local Supercluster (LS) coming from the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) and Tevatron accelerator experiments. By considering annual variations of the solar gravitational potential instead of the absolute potentials we predict the bounds 0.96 < m_g/m < 1.04 for an electron and positron, ruling out the speculated antigravity phenomenon. We also comment on a possibility of performing complementary tests at the future International Linear Collider (ILC) and Compact Linear Collider (CLIC).