Testing Einstein’s equivalence principle near a supermassive black hole

The GRAVITY Collaboration, a team of researchers at several renowned institutes including the Max Planck Institute, LESIA Paris Observatory and the European Southern Observatory, has recently tested part of the Einstein Equivalence Principle, namely the local positon invariance (LPI), near the galactic center supermassive black hole. Their study, published on Physics Review Letters (PRL), investigated the dependency of different atomic transitions on the gravitational potential in order to give an upper limit on LPI violations.