Precision measurement of the relativistic Doppler shift of an accelerated system

Abstract

We report on a direct measurement of the relativistic Doppler shift with a Mach-Zehnder type interferometer, where the object mirror is subject to an accelerated motion. The measurement was realized with a commercial free-fall absolute gravimeter FG5X, which is usually used to measure the local acceleration due to gravity, g. The second order term of the Doppler shift has been measured with a relative uncertainty of 1.1 × 10 −3 .