1,721,019 research outputs found
Constraints on quantum spacetime-induced decoherence from neutrino oscillations
No full textWe investigate the implications of decoherence induced by quantum spacetime properties on neutrino oscillation phenomena. We develop a general formalism where the evolution of neutrinos is governed by a Lindblad-type equation and we compute the oscillation damping factor for various models that have been proposed in the literature. Furthermore, we discuss the sensitivity to these effects of different types of neutrino oscillation experiments, encompassing astrophysical, atmospheric, solar, and reactor neutrino experiments. By using neutrino oscillation data from long-baseline reactors and atmospheric neutrino observations, we establish stringent constraints on the energy scale governing the strength of the decoherence induced by stochastic metric fluctuations, amounting to, respectively, EQG≥2.6×1034 GeV and EQG≥2.5×1055 GeV
Cosmic Microwave Background Polarization as a Test for Fundamental Physics
No full textWe study and constrain quantum-gravity-inspired models that violate classical Lorentz spacetime symmetries using CMB polarization data. This work contains both a theoretical work developing a specific model for Planck-scale Lorentz-violating electrodynamics and a phenomenological work deducing the observable consequences for CMB polarization and giving constraints on the model
On the theory and phenomenology of spacetime symmetries at the Planck scale
No full textWe consider some alternative scenarios for the fate of Poincare/Lorentz symmetry at the Planck scale, and we discuss some opportunities to test these scenarios
Pathways to relativistic curved momentum spaces: De Sitter case study
No full textSeveral arguments suggest that the Planck scale could be the characteristic scale of curvature of momentum space. As other recent studies, we assume that the metric of momentum space determines the condition of on-shellness while the momentum space affine connection governs the form of the law of composition of momenta. We show that the possible choices of laws of composition of momenta are more numerous than the possible choices of affine connection on a momentum space. This motivates us to propose a new prescription for associating an affine connection to momentum composition, which we compare to the one most used in the recent literature. We find that the two prescriptions lead to the same picture of the so-called
Discreteness of area in noncommutative spacetime
No full textAbstractWe introduce an area operator for the Moyal noncommutative plane. We find that the spectrum is discrete, but, contrary to the expectation formulated by other authors, not characterized by a “minimum-area principle”. We show that an intuitive analysis of the uncertainty relations obtained from Moyal-plane noncommutativity is fully consistent with our results for the spectrum, and we argue that our area operator should be generalizable to several other noncommutative spaces. We also observe that the properties of distances and areas in the Moyal plane expose some weaknesses in the line of reasoning adopted in some of the heuristic analyses of the measurability of geometric spacetime observables in the quantum-gravity realm
Dimensional reduction in momentum space and scale-invariant cosmological fluctuations
No full textWe adopt a framework where quantum gravity's dynamical dimensional reduction of spacetime at short distances is described in terms of modified dispersion relations. We observe that by subjecting such models to a momentum-space diffeomorphism one obtains a "dual picture" with unmodified dispersion relations, but a modified measure of integration over momenta. We then find that the UV Hausdorff dimension of momentum space which can be inferred from this modified integration measure coincides with the short-distance spectral dimension of spacetime. This result sheds light into why scale-invariant fluctuations are obtained if the original model for two UV spectral dimensions is combined with Einstein gravity. By studying the properties of the inner product we derive the result that it is only in two energy-momentum dimensions that microphysical vacuum fluctuations are scale invariant. This is true ignoring gravity, but then we find that if Einstein gravity is postulated in the original frame, in the dual picture gravity switches off, since all matter becomes conformally coupled. We argue that our findings imply that the following concepts are closely connected: scale invariance of vacuum quantum fluctuations, conformal invariance of the gravitational coupling, UV reduction to spectral dimension two in position space, and UV reduction to Hausdorff dimension two in energy-momentum space
Planck-scale sensitivity of CMB polarization data
No full textWe show that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization data gathered by the BOOMERanG 2003 flight and WMAP provide an opportunity to investigate in-vacuo birefringence, of a type expected in some quantum pictures of space-time, with a sensitivity that extends even beyond the desired Planck-scale energy. In order to render this constraint more transparent we rely on a well studied phenomenological model of quantum-gravity-induced birefringence, in which one easily establishes that effects introduced at the Planck scale would amount to values of a dimensionless parameter, denoted by xi, with respect to the Planck energy which are roughly of order 1. By combining BOOMERanG and WMAP data we estimate xi similar or equal to -0.097 +/- 0.075 at the 68% c.l. Moreover, we forecast on the sensitivity to xi achievable by future CMB polarization experiments (PLANCK, Spider, EPIC), which, in the absence of systematics, will be at the 1-sigma confidence of 8.5 x 10(-4) (PLANCK), 6.1 x 10(-3) (Spider), and 1.0 x 10(-5) (EPIC) respectively. The cosmic variance-limited sensitivity from CMB is 6.1 x 10(-6)
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