Constraining Anisotropic Lorentz Violation via the Spectral-lag Transition of GRB 160625B

Violations of Lorentz invariance can lead to an energy-dependent vacuum dispersion of light, which results in arrival-time differences of photons with different energies arising from a given transient source. In this work, direction-dependent dispersion constraints are obtained on nonbirefringent Lo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2017-06, Vol.842 (2), p.115
Main Authors: Wei, Jun-Jie, Wu, Xue-Feng, Zhang, Bin-Bin, Shao, Lang, Mészáros, Peter, Kostelecký, V. Alan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
astronomy & astrophysics
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
astroparticle physics
Astrophysics
Dispersion
Energy bands
Gamma ray bursts
Gamma rays
gamma-ray burst
gamma-ray burst: individual (GRB 160625B)
gravitation
Photons
Spectra
Time lag
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Summary:Violations of Lorentz invariance can lead to an energy-dependent vacuum dispersion of light, which results in arrival-time differences of photons with different energies arising from a given transient source. In this work, direction-dependent dispersion constraints are obtained on nonbirefringent Lorentz-violating effects using the observed spectral lags of the gamma-ray burst GRB 160625B. This burst has unusually large high-energy photon statistics, so we can obtain constraints from the true spectral time lags of bunches of high-energy photons rather than from the rough time lag of a single highest-energy photon. Also, GRB 160625B is the only burst to date having a well-defined transition from positive lags to negative lags, providing a unique opportunity to distinguish Lorentz-violating effects from any source-intrinsic time lag in the emission of photons of different energy bands. Our results place comparatively robust two-sided constraints on a variety of isotropic and anisotropic coefficients for Lorentz violation, including the first bounds on Lorentz-violating effects from operators of mass dimension 10 in the photon sector.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
1538-4357
DOI:10.3847/1538-4357/aa7630