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Constraints on Lorentz invariance violation using HAWC observations above 100 TeV

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 نشر من قبل Humberto Mart\\'inez-Huerta
 تاريخ النشر 2019
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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Due to the high energies and long distances involved, astrophysical observations provide a unique opportunity to test possible signatures of Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV). Superluminal LIV enables the decay of photons at high energy over relatively short distances, giving astrophysical spectra which have a hard cutoff above this energy. The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory is the most sensitive currently-operating gamma-ray observatory in the world above 10 TeV. Together with the recent development of an energy-reconstruction algorithm for HAWC using an artificial neural network, HAWC can make detailed measurements of gamma-ray energies above 100 TeV. With these observations, HAWC can limit the LIV energy scale greater than $10^{31}$ eV, over 800 times the Planck energy scale. This limit on LIV is over 60 times more constraining than the best previous value for $rm E_{LIV}^{(1)}$.

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Due to the high energies and long distances to the sources, astrophysical observations provide a unique opportunity to test possible signatures of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). Superluminal LIV enables the decay of photons at high energy. The H igh Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory is among the most sensitive gamma-ray instruments currently operating above 10 TeV. HAWC finds evidence of 100 TeV photon emission from at least four astrophysical sources. These observations exclude, for the strongest of the limits set, the LIV energy scale to $2.2times10^{31}$ eV, over 1800 times the Planck energy and an improvement of 1 to 2 orders of magnitude over previous limits.
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