Anisotropic cubic curvature couplings

Understand

To complement recent work on tests of spacetime symmetry in gravity, cubic curvature couplings are studied using an effective field theory description of spacetime-symmetry breaking.

• The associated mass dimension 8 coefficients for Lorentz violation studied do not result in any linearized gravity modifications and instead are revealed in the first nonlinear terms in an expansion of spacetime around a flat background.
• We consider effects on gravitational radiation through the energy loss of a binary system and we study two-body orbital perturbations using the post-Newtonian metric.
• Some effects depend on the internal structure of the source and test bodies, thereby breaking the Weak Equivalence Principle for self-gravitating bodies.