No Arabic abstract
This article reports on the Fourth Meeting on Lorentz and CPT Symmetry, CPT 07, held in August 2007 in Bloomington, Indiana, USA. The focus is on recent tests of Lorentz symmetry using atomic and optical physics. Results presented at the meeting include improved bounds on Lorentz violation in the photon sector, and the first bounds on several coefficients in the gravity sector.
Signals of CPT and Lorentz violation are possible in the context of spectroscopy using hydrogen and antihydrogen. We apply the Standard-Model Extension, a broad framework for Lorentz breaking in physics, to various transitions in the hydrogen and antihydrogen spectra. The results show an unsuppressed effect in the transition between the upper two hyperfine sublevels of the ground state of these systems. We also discuss related tests in Penning traps, and recent work on Lorentz violation in curved spacetime.
Interferometric gyroscope systems are being developed with the goal of measuring general-relativistic effects including frame-dragging effects. Such devices are also capable of performing searches for Lorentz violation. We summarize efforts that relate gyroscope measurements to coefficients for Lorentz violation in the gravity sector of the Standard-Model Extension.
We explore the breaking of Lorentz and CPT invariance in strong interactions at low energy in the framework of chiral perturbation theory. Starting from the set of Lorentz-violating operators of mass-dimension five with quark and gluon fields, we construct the effective chiral Lagrangian with hadronic and electromagnetic interactions induced by these operators. We develop the power-counting scheme and discuss loop diagrams and the one-pion-exchange nucleon-nucleon potential. The effective chiral Lagrangian is the basis for calculations of low-energy observables with hadronic degrees of freedom. As examples, we consider clock-comparison experiments with nuclei and spin-precession experiments with nucleons in storage rings. We derive strict limits on the dimension-five tensors that quantify Lorentz and CPT violation.
We propose using a Stark interference technique to directly measure the odd-parity c_{0j} components of the electron sector c_{mu u} tensor of the Standard-Model Extension. This technique has been shown to be a sensitive probe of parity violation in atomic dysprosium in a low-energy, tabletop experiment, and may also be straightforwardly applied to test Lorentz invariance. We estimate that such an experiment may be sensitive to c_{0j} coefficients as small as 10^{-18}.
Lorentz and CPT tests involving matter-antimatter comparisons at low temperatures are discussed. SME predictions for transition frequencies in such systems include both matter-antimatter differences and sidereal variations. In hydrogen-antihydrogen spectroscopy, leading-order effects in a 1S-2S transition as well as in a 1S Zeeman transition could exist that can be employed to obtain clean constraints. Similarly, tight bounds can be determined from Penning-trap experiments involving antiprotons.