TeV astrophysics constraints on Planck scale Lorentz violation

By T. Jacobson, Stefano Liberati, D. Mattingly. 2001

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cerenkov radiation, photon decay and photo-production of electron-positron pairs. We show that the parameter plane for cubic momentum terms in the dispersion relations is constrained to an order unity region in Planck units. We find that the threshold configuration can occur with an asymmetric distribution of momentum for pair creation, and with a hard photon for vacuum y Cerenkov radiation. There are several reasons to suspect that Lorentz in- variance may be only a low energy symmetry. This possi- bility is suggested by the ultraviolet divergences of local quantum field theory, as well as by tentative results in various approaches to quantum gravity and string the- ory (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Moreover, Lorentz symmetry can only ever be verified up to some finite observationally accessi- ble velocity, which leaves untested an infinite volume of the supposed symmetry group. The possibility of Lorentz violation can be studied, without a particular fundamental theory in hand, by con- sidering its manifestation in dispersion relations for par- ticles. If rotational invariance is preserved, it is natural to assume that deviations from the Lorentz invariant dis- persion relation E 2 (p) = m 2 + p 2 can be characterized at low energies by an expansion with integral powers of momentum, E 2 = m 2 + p 2 + P ∞=1 anp n , where the an are coefficients with mass dimension 2− n which might be positive or negative. (Throughout this letter p de- notes the absolute value of the 3-momentum vector p, and we use units with the low energy speed of light in vacuum equal to unity.) Different approaches to quantum gravity suggest different leading order Lorentz violating terms. The terms with n ≤ 4 have mostly been consid- ered so far. Observations limit the coefficientsa1,2 to be extremely small (see e.g. (6, 7, 8) and references therein). In this letter we shall assume they are precisely zero. The cubic and higher order coefficients have negative mass dimension, so if the Lorentz violation descends from the Planck scale MP = (¯ hc 5 /G) 1/2 ≃ 1.22 � 10 19 GeV, an would be expected to be of order M 2−n P. In this case the Lorentz violation is naturally suppressed, and the lowest order term would dominate all the higher ones as long as the momentum is less than MP, hence we shall restrict to a single Lorentz violating term. We thus consider the constraints that high energy observations impose on dispersion relations of the form E 2

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31bdf80bec33689d547ba9f387d69cd616a09348

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Citations in the corpus

Review of the phenomenology of noncommutative geometry (2002, background): “Among some of the work in Lorentz violation [35, 37, 38, 39] are predictions of a number of exotic phenomena, such as the decay of high-energy photons and charged particles producing Cerenkov radiation in vacuum.”
Quantum-Spacetime Phenomenology (2008, methodology): “And certain observations in astrophysics, which allow us to establish that photons of energies up to ∼ 10(14) eV are stable, can then be used [305, 59, 334, 115] to set limits on schemes for departures from Lorentz symmetry.”
Lorentz violation at high energy: Concepts, phenomena, and astrophysical constraints (2005, background): “6 This corrects a prior assertion [64,53] that the rate scales as E.”
Dark matter as integration constant in Horava-Lifshitz gravity (2009, unknown): “[41, 42, 43] for tight experimental limits on Lorentz violation.”
Modern Tests of Lorentz Invariance (2005, background): “For O(1) f (3) γ , ωth ∼ 10 TeV, and so we can get a slightly better than O(1) constraint on f (3) γ from 50 TeV photons [152].”