Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2004-10-04
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
shorter version to comply with page limits of proceedings volume (to appear in proceedings of Huntsville Workshop 2002)
Scientific paper
In the recent quantum-gravity literature there has been strong interest in the possibility of Planck-scale departures from Lorentz symmetry, including possible modifications of the energy/momentum dispersion relation. I stress that a meaningful characterization of the progress of experimental bounds on these Planck-scale effects requires the analysis of some reference test theories, and I propose to focus on two ``minimal'' test theories, a pure-kinematics test theory and an effective-field-theory-based test theory. I illustrate some features of the phenomenology based on these test theories considering some popular strategies for constraining Planck-scale effects, and in particular I observe that sensitivities that are already in the Planck-scale range for some parameters of the two test theories can be achieved using observations of TeV photons from Blazars, both using the so-called ``gamma-ray time-of-flight analyses'' and using the now robust evidence of absorption of TeV photons. Instead the Crab-nebula synchrotron-radiation analyses, whose preliminary sensitivity estimates raised high hopes, actually do not lead to any bound on the parameters of the two ``minimal'' test theories. The Crab-nebula synchrotron-radiation analyses do however constrain some possible generalizations of one of the minimal test theories. As an example of forthcoming data which could provide extremely stringent (beyond-Planckian) limits on the two minimal test theories I consider the possibility of studies of the GZK cutoff for cosmic-rays.
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