No Arabic abstract
The violation of spacetime symmetries provides a promising candidate signal for underlying physics, possibly arising at the Planck scale. This talk gives an overview over various aspects in the field, including some mechanisms for Lorentz breakdown, the SME test framework, and phenomenological signatures for such effects.
The Lorentz- and CPT-violating Chern-Simons extension of electrodynamics is considered. In the context of N=4 supergravity in four spacetime dimensions, it is argued that cosmological solutions can generate this extension. Within Chern-Simons electrodynamics, theoretical and phenomenological topics are reviewed that concern the number of the remaining spacetime symmetries and the vacuum Cherenkov effect, respectively.
An important open question in fundamental physics concerns the nature of spacetime at distance scales associated with the Planck length. The widespread belief that probing such distances necessitates Planck-energy particles has impeded phenomenological and experimental research in this context. However, it has been realized that various theoretical approaches to underlying physics can accommodate Planck-scale violations of spacetime symmetries. This talk surveys the motivations for spacetime-symmetry research, the SME test framework, and experimental efforts in this field.
Possibilities emerging out of the dynamical evolutions of collapsing systems are addressed in this thesis through analytical investigations of the highly non-linear Einstein Field Equations. Studies of exact solutions and their properties, play a non-trivial role in general relativity, even in the current context. Finding non-trivial solutions to the Einstein field equations requires some reduction of the problem, which usually is done by exploiting symmetries or other properties. Exact solutions of the Einsteins field equations describing an unhindered gravitational collapse are studied which generally predict an ultimate singular end-state. In the vicinity of such a spacetime singularity, the energy densities, spacetime curvatures, and all other physical quantities blow up. Despite exhaustive attempts over decades, the famous conjecture that the formation of a singularity during stellar collapse necessarily accompanies the formation of an event horizon, thereby covering the central singularity, still remains without a proof. Moreover, there are examples of stellar collapse models with reasonable matter contribution in which an event horizon does not form at all, giving rise to a naked singularity from which both matter and radiation can fall in and come out. These examples suggest that the so-called cosmic censorship conjecture may not be a general rule. Therefore one must embark upon analysis of realistic theoretical models of gravitational collapse and gradually generalizing previous efforts.
We present new constraints on Lorentz symmetry (LS) violations with lunar laser ranging (LLR). Those constraints are derived in the standard-model extension (SME) framework aiming at parameterizing any LS deviations in all sectors of physics. We restrict ourself to two sectors namely the pure gravitational sector of the minimal SME and the gravity-matter coupling. We describe the adopted method and compare our results to previous analysis based on theoretical grounds. This work constitutes the first direct experimental determination of the SME coefficients using LLR measurements.
The standard-model extension (SME) is an effective field theory framework aiming at parametrizing any violation to the Lorentz symmetry (LS) in all sectors of physics. In this Letter, we report the first direct experimental measurement of SME coefficients performed simultaneously within two sectors of the SME framework using lunar laser ranging observations. We consider the pure gravitational sector and the classical point-mass limit in the matter sector of the minimal SME. We report no deviation from general relativity and put new realistic stringent constraints on LS violations improving up to 3 orders of magnitude previous estimations.