Threshold effects and Planck scale Lorentz violation: Combined constraints from high-energy astrophysics

By T. Jacobson, Stefano Liberati, D. Mattingly. 2002

208 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent work has shown that dispersion relations with Planck scale Lorentz violation can produce observable effects at energies many orders of magnitude below the Planck energy M. This opens a window on physics that may reveal quantum gravity phenomena. It has already constrained the possibility of Planck scale Lorentz violation, which is suggested by some approaches to quantum gravity. In this work we carry out a systematic analysis of reaction thresholds, allowing unequal deformation parameters for different particle dispersion relations. The thresholds are found to have some unusual properties compared with standard ones, such as asymmetric momenta for pair creation and upper thresholds. The results are used together with high energy observational data to determine combined constraints. We focus on the case of photons and electrons, using vacuum Cerenkov, photon decay, and photon annihilation processes to determine order unity constraints on the parameters controlling O(E/M) Lorentz violation. Interesting constraints for protons (with photons or pions) are obtained even at O((E/M)^2), using the absence of vacuum Cerenkov and the observed GZK cutoff for ultra high energy cosmic rays. A strong Cerenkov limit using atmospheric PeV neutrinos is possible for O(E/M) deformations provided the rate is high enough. If detected, ultra high energy cosmological neutrinos might yield limits at or even beyond O((E/M)^2).

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/80d8d8b93344410028f115d90f37bb7c478e3e90

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Citations in the corpus

Modern Tests of Lorentz Invariance (2005, background): “The same analysis can be applied in this case, although for more general Lorentz violation there are other scenarios where Čerenkov radiation occurs even though the speed condition is not met (see below) [154].”
Quantum-Spacetime Phenomenology (2008, unknown): “This is a very powerful tool for quantum-spacetime phenomenology [327, 38, 73, 463, 512, 364, 307, 494], and, in fact, at the beginning of this review, I chose the evaluation of the threshold energy for photopion production, p+ γCMBR → p+ π, as the basis for illustrating how the sensitivity levels t”
Lorentz violation at high energy: Concepts, phenomena, and astrophysical constraints (2005, background): “8 A detailed investigation of upper thresholds was carried out by the present authors in [53,69].”
Tests of Lorentz invariance: a 2013 update (2013, background): “One then expects the analysis proposed in [80] to be correct and the splitting timescale to be negligible at Eγ 1019 eV.”
Analogue Gravity (2005, background): “Remarkably the last years have seen a large wealth of work in testing the effects of such dispersion relations and in particular strong constraints have been cast by making use of high energy astrophysics observations (see for example [3, 82, 195, 194, 196, 197, 261, 355] and references therein).”