New limits on Planck scale Lorentz violation in QED

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  • 25 September 2003
Abstract
We strengthen the constraints on possible Lorentz symmetry violation (LV) of order E/M_Planck for electrons and photons in the framework of effective field theory (EFT). The new constraints use (i) the absence of vacuum birefringence in the recently observed polarization of MeV emission from a gamma ray burst and (ii) the absence of vacuum Cerenkov radiation from the synchrotron electrons in the Crab nebula, improving the previous bounds by eleven and four orders of magnitude respectively. We also show that in this context the LV parameters for positrons are different than those for electrons, discuss the process of helicity decay in which an electron of one helicity flips to the other with the emission of a photon, and investigate how the relations between LV parameters implied by EFT strengthen or weaken prior constraints.

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