TeV Astrophysics Constraints on Planck Scale Lorentz Violation
Abstract
Lorentz violation at high energies might lead to nonlinear dispersion relations for the fundamental particles. We analyze observational constraints on these dispersion relations without assuming any a priori equality between the coefficients determining the amount of Lorentz violation for different particle species. We focus on constraints from thresholds for three high energy processes involving photons and electrons: vacuum Cerenkov radiation, photon decay and photo-production of electron-positron pairs. We show that the kinematics of these interactions have novel features with respect to the Lorentz invariant case. Not only are the first two of them allowed for some ranges of the coefficients but also the thresholds for pair creation can occur with asymmetric distribution of the total momentum. We find that cubic momentum terms in the dispersion relations are strongly constrained by astrophysical observations.Keywords
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