Improved limits on Lorentz invariance violation from astrophysical gamma-ray sources

Rodrigo Guedes Lang*, Humberto Martínez-Huerta, Vitor De Souza

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

51 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Lorentz invariance (LI) has a central role in science and its violation (LIV) at some high-energy scale has been related to possible solutions for several of the most intriguing puzzles in nature such as dark matter, dark energy, cosmic rays generation in extreme astrophysical objects and quantum gravity. We report on a search for LIV signal based on the propagation of gamma rays from astrophysical sources to Earth. An innovative data analysis is presented which allowed us to extract unprecedented information from the most updated data set composed of 111 energy spectra of 38 different sources measured by current gamma-ray observatories. No LIV signal was found, and we show that the data are best described by LI assumption. We derived limits for the LIV energy scale at least 3 times better than the ones currently available in the literature for subluminal signatures of LIV in high-energy gamma rays.

Original languageEnglish
Article number043015
JournalPhysical Review D
Volume99
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Feb 2019
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge FAPESP support No. 2015/15897-1, No. 2016/24943-0, and No. 2017/03680-3. The authors also acknowledge the National Laboratory for Scientific Computing (LNCC/MCTI, Brazil) for providing HPC resources of the SDumont supercomputer, which have contributed to the research results reported within this paper ( http://sdumont.lncc.br ).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 American Physical Society.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous)

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