A PROPOSAL OF NEW GRAVITATIONAL EXPERIMENTS

Since ''evidently the construction of a laboratory generator of gravit ational radiation is an unattractive enterprise in the absence of new engineering or a new idea or both'' [C. W. Misner, K. S. Thorne and J. A. Wheeler, Gravitation (Freeman, 1973), p. 979], we propose in this letter some new experiments on the physics of gravitation. These exper iments refer to: simulation of accelerations produced by a gravity wav e, a source of high-frequency gravitational waves, a direct current gr avitational machine, materials with high gravitomagnetic permeability, and finally the possibility of an attenuation of the gravitational at traction. The new ideas involve essentially first the concept of a det ector or a source of gravitational radiation in the form of a body in which the motions of particles are precisely the same as those induced by a real gravitational wave in that body, and second, to design a de tector having two principal components placed at a distance of lambda/ 2 along the direction of propagation of a gravity wave. We define a ne w type of gravitomagnetic field generated directly by the time-depende nt tidal accelerations of the gravitational wave, and we also define a new concept: the gravitational superconductor.