Recent Progress on Gravity Tests: Challenges and Future Perspectives

Einstein's theory of general relativity is one of the pillars of modern physics and it is our standard framework for describing gravitational fields and the spacetime structure. So far, general relativity has passed all experimental tests and agrees with observations. However, the past few years have seen remarkable observational improvements and new techniques that continually challenge the theory's predictions: routinely detect the gravitational wave signals from the coalescence of black holes and neutron stars; can image the supermassive black holes at the center of our Galaxy and of the galaxy M87; can analyze the properties of the X-ray radiation emitted from the very inner part of the accretion disks of several black holes; and keep improving laboratory and Solar System experiments.

This book offers an updated self-consistent overview, future perspectives, and challenges of experimental and observational tests of gravity, with both gravitational and electromagnetic spectra. It includes the recent results of laboratory tests of gravity, solar system experiments, tests of gravity in the strong-field regime with astrophysical compact objects, and tests of gravity on large scales with cosmological observations.

Cosimo Bambi is currently Xie Xide Junior Chair Professor at the Department of Physics at Fudan University (Shanghai, China). He received the Laurea degree from Florence University in 2003 and the Ph.D. degree from Ferrara University in 2007. He was appointed as Postdoc at Wayne State University (Michigan), IPMU/The University of Tokyo (Japan), and at LMU Munich (Germany). He joined Fudan University at the end of 2012 under the 1000 Young Talents Program. His main research interests focus on black holes and observational tests of gravity models. He has published more than 200 papers on high impact factor refereed journals as first or corresponding author and has over 10,000 citations. He has published with Springer several books, either as Author or as Editor.

Alejandro Cárdenas-Avendaño is an associate research scholar at the Gravity Initiative at Princeton University. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2021. As a theoretical astrophysicist, Alejandro studies observational signatures of Einstein's theory of general relativity from astrophysical phenomena across the gravitational and electromagnetic spectra.