Improved Kennedy-Thorndike experiment to test special relativity

Abstract

A modern version of the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment was carried out by searching for sidereal variations between the frequency of a laser locked to an I2 reference line and a laser locked to the resonance frequency of a highly stable cavity. No variations were found at the level of 2 x 10 to the -12th. This represents a 300-fold improvement over the original Kennedy-Thorndike experiment and allows the Lorentz transformations to be deduced entirely from experiment at an accuracy level of 70 ppm.