Tests of gravity theories with pulsar timing

Abstract

Over the last few years, a set of new results from pulsar timing has introduced much tighter constraints on violations of the strong equivalence principle (SEP), either via a direct verification of the universality of free fall for a pulsar in a triple star system, or from tests of the nature of gravitational waves, in particular a search for dipolar gravitational wave emission in a variety of binary pulsars with different masses. No deviations from the SEP have been detected in our experiments. These results introduce some of the most stringent constraints on several classes of alternative theories of gravity and complement recent results from the ground-based gravitational wave detectors.