Foucault pendulum at the South Pole: Proposal for an experiment to detect the Earth's general relativistic gravitomagnetic field

• Published in: Physical Review Letters
• Main Authors: Braginsky, Vladimir B., Polnarev, Aleksander G., Thorne, Kip S.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Physical Society 1984
• Subjects: Fairbank; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.863

An experiment is proposed for measuring the earth's gravitomagnetic field by monitoring its effect on the plane of swing of a Foucault pendulum at the south pole ("dragging of inertial frames by earth's rotation"). With great effort a 10% experiment in a measurement time of several months might be achieved. ©1984 The American Physical Society. Received 12 March 1984. For helpful discussions we thank Dana Anderson, Andy Buffington, William Fairbank, Jack Harvey, Henry Hill, Gary Holcomb, Hiroo Kanamori, Ken Libbrecht, Jon Peterson, Jim Taggert, and Stan Whitcomb, and especially Peter Bender, Ron Drever, Francis Everitt, Brian Pippard, and Ray Weiss. This research was supported in part by the Academy of Sciences U.S.S.R., the Ministry of Higher Education, U.S.S.R., and the National Science Foundation (Grant No. AST82-14126).