Orateur
Description
General Relativity (GR) is the best description of gravity so far. In 2018, the MICROSCOPE mission tested its cornerstone, the Equivalence Principle (EP), with unprecedented precision, setting the current state-of-the-art upper limit on its validity. Yet, keeping on testing gravity at better precision is of crucial interest in the quest of a model that could explain Dark Matter, Dark Energy or unify forces.
MICROSCOPE could give more information than just testing the EP: by measuring the gravitational interaction between its Test Masses (TM), it is, in principle, possible to look for a deviation to GR at small scales (~). Nevertheless, beside MICROSCOPE not being optimized for this, looking for a small-scale fifth-forces was limited by the use of simplifying assumptions about MICROSCOPE’s geometry.
In this talk, I will show how Finite Elements Method simulations can help overcome such simplifications. I will also discuss how STEIN (MICROSCOPE successor) may allow us to look for fifth-forces between its TM, showing the first results made by simulating Yukawa interaction in a STEIN-like satellite.