Any possible Lorentz violation in the hadron sector must be tied to Lorentz violation at the underlying quark level. The relationships between the theories at these two levels are studied using chiral perturbation theory. Starting from a two-flavor quark theory that includes dimension-4 Lorentz-violation operators, the effective Lagrangians are derived for both pions and nucleons, with novel terms appearing in both sectors. Since the Lorentz-violation coefficients for nucleons and pions are all related to a single set of underlying quark coefficients, one can compare the sensitivity of different types of experiments. Our analysis shows that atomic physics experiments currently provide constraints on the quark parameters that are stronger by about 10 orders of magnitude than astrophysical experiments with relativistic pions. Alternatively, it is possible to place approximate bounds on pion Lorentz violation using only proton and neutron observations. Under the assumption that the Lorentz-violating operators considered here are the only ones contributing to the relevant observables and taking the currently unknown hadronic low-energy constants to be of natural size, the resulting estimated bounds on four pion parameters are at the ${10}^{-23}$ level, representing improvements of 10 orders of magnitude.

• Received 23 August 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.95.056005