NEW TEST OF THE EINSTEIN EQUIVALENCE PRINCIPLE AND THE ISOTROPY OF SPACE

Recent research has established that nonsymmetric gravitation theories such as Moffat's NGT predict that a gravitational field singles out an orthogonal pair of polarization states of light that propagate with different phase velocities. We show that a much wider class of nonmetric theories encompassed by the chi g formalism predicts such violations of the Einstein equivalence principle. This gravity-induced birefringence of space implies that propagation through a gravitational field can alter the polarization of light. We use data from polarization measurements of extragalactic sources to constrain birefringence induced by the field of the Galaxy. Our new constraint is 10(8) times sharper than previous ones.