Probing Quantum Gravity using Photons from a flare of the active galactic nucleus Markarian 501 Observed by the MAGIC telescope

By J. A. E. al., John Ellis, N. Mavromatos, D. Nanopoulos, Alexander S. Sakharov, E. Sarkisyan. 2007

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We analyze the timing of photons observed by the MAGIC telescope during a flare of the active galactic nucleus Mkn 501 for a possible correlation with energy, as suggested by some models of quantum gravity (QG), which predict a vacuum refractive index similar or equal to 1 + (E/M-QGn)(n), n = 1, 2. Parametrizing the delay between gamma-rays of different energies as Delta t = +/-tau E-1 or Delta t = +/-tau E-q(2), we find tau(1) = (0.030 +/- 0.012) s/GeV at the 2.5-sigma level, and tau(q) = (3.71 +/- 2.57) x 10(-6) s/GeV2, respectively. We use these results to establish lower limits M-QG1 > 0.21 X 10(18) GeV and M-QG2 > 0.26 x 10(11) GeV at the 95% C.L. Monte Carlo studies confirm the MAGIC sensitivity to propagation effects at these levels. Thermal plasma effects in the source are negligible, but we cannot exclude the importance of some other source effect. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3f02da486bd2f871566f901a4d87ebb84117fe7

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Citations in the corpus

Hořava gravity at a Lifshitz point: A progress report (2017, background): “In addition, the timing of active galactic nuclei [148] and gamma ray bursts [149] require”
A new interpretation of the gamma-ray observations of distant active galactic nuclei (2009, background): “This is consistent with the MAGIC observations of energy-dependent delays from a Mrk 501 flare [14].”
Astrophysical Tests of Lorentz and CPT Violation with Photons (2008, methodology): “A recent analysis of observations by the MAGIC collaboration found some evidence for a nonbirefringent velocity defect of the form δv = −ω/M or δv = −ω2/M2 (Albert et al. 2008).”
Teraelectronvolt Astronomy (2010, background): “Limits on annihilation fluxes have been obtained e.g for the Galactic Center (Aharonian et al. 2006h), the dwarf galaxies Draco (Albert et al. 2008d, Wood et al. 2008), Ursa Minor (Wood et al. 2008) and Sagittarius (Aharonian et al. 2008f), for local group galaxies (Wood et al. 2008) and for the glo”
Quantum-Spacetime Phenomenology (2008, background): “In particular, studies of TeV flares from Mk 501 and PKS 2155–304 performed by the MAGIC [233] and HESS [285] observatories have established [218, 29, 226, 18, 10, 129] bounds on the scale of dispersion, for the linear-effects (“n = 1”) scenario, at about 1/10 of the Planck scale.”