Testing Weak Equivalence Principle with Strongly Lensed Cosmic Transients

Abstract

Current constraints on Einstein's weak equivalence principle (WEP) utilize the observed time delay between correlated particles of astronomical sources. However, the intrinsic time delay due to particle emission time is impossible to measure and is simply assumed to be zero in previous studies. Here we propose a robust method to test WEP for relativistic messengers using strongly lensed cosmic transients, which can naturally overcome the intrinsic time delay problem. This can be achieved in two ways: by comparing the time delays between lensed images seen in different energy bands or in gravitational waves (GWs) and their electromagnetic (EM) counterparts. The power of our method mainly depends on the timing accuracy of cosmic transient and the strong lensing time delay. If the time delay of cosmic transient can be measured with accuracy about 0.1 s (e.g. gamma-ray bursts), we show that the upper limit on the differences of the parameterized post-Newtonian parameter $γ$ value is $Δγ<10^{-7}$ with a one-month strong lensing time delay event. This accuracy of WEP can be improved by a factor of $10^{7}$, if the lens is galaxy cluster and the strongly lensed cosmic transients have much shorter duration, such as fast radio bursts.