Abstract
We report the strictest observational verification of invariance in the photon sector, as a result of -ray polarization measurement of distant gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are the brightest stellar-sized explosions in the Universe. We detected -ray polarization of three GRBs with high significance levels, and the source distances may be constrained by a well-known luminosity indicator for GRBs. For the Lorentz- and -violating dispersion relation , where denotes different circular polarization states of the photon, the parameter is constrained as . Barring precise cancellation between quantum gravity effects and dark energy effects, the stringent limit on the -violating effect leads to the expectation that quantum gravity presumably respects the invariance.
- Received 29 August 2012
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.241104
© 2012 American Physical Society
Synopsis
Distant Bursts Show no Signs of Predicted Light Rotation
Published 13 December 2012
Cosmic gamma-ray bursts turn out to be polarized, which rules out the breaking of a fundamental symmetry down to the lowest limits ever observed.
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