Photon splitting constraint on Lorentz invariance violation from Crab Nebula spectrum

We calculate the decay width of the photon splitting into three photons in a model of quantum electrodynamics with broken Lorentz invariance. We show that this process can lead to a cut-off in the very-high-energy part of a photon spectra of astrophysical sources. We obtain the 95% CL bound on the Lorentz violating mass scale for photons from the analysis of the very-high-energy part of the Crab Nebula spectrum, obtained by HEGRA. This bound improves previous constraints by more than an order of magnitude.