Progress and plans are reported for a program of gravitational physics experiments using cryogenic torsion pendula undergoing large amplitude torsional oscillation. The program includes a UC Irvine project to measure the gravitational constant G and joint UC Irvine– U. Washington projects to test the gravitational inverse square law at a range of about 10 cm and to test the weak equivalence pri...

We propose a feasible laboratory interferometry experiment with matter waves in a gravitational potential caused by a pair of artificial field-generating masses. It will demonstrate that the presence of these masses (and, for moving atoms, time dilation) induces a phase shift, even if it does not cause any classical force. The phase shift is identical to that produced by the gravitational redsh...

An analysis of a spherically symmetric braneworld configuration is performed when the intrinsic curvature scalar is included in the bulk action; the vanishing of the electric part of the Weyl tensor is used as the boundary condition for the embedding of the brane in the bulk. All the solutions outside a static localized matter distribution are found; some of them are of the Schwarzschild-(A)dS4...

The aim of the AGAPE (Andromeda Gravitational Ampli cation Pixel Experiment), experiment which has been rst proposed in June 1992 is to examine the distribution of massive astrophysical compact halo objects ((MACHO's) which possibly are in the galactic haloes and which could account for the missing dark matter. Those objects have a mass which is a fraction of solar mass and could be detected by...

We consider a thought experiment measuring the decoherence for quasiclassical superpositions of gravitational field. The hole argument allows to prove that a covariant (background-free) theory is completely unable to define the outcome of this experiment and is therefore not viable. Instead, the results of experiments of this type allow to reconstruct a common background shared by all superpose...