Exploring Lorentz Invariance Violation from Ultrahigh-Energy γ

Recently, the LHAASO Collaboration published the detection of 12 ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray sources above 100 TeV, with the highest energy photon reaching 1.4 PeV. The first detection of PeV gamma rays from astrophysical sources may provide a very sensitive probe of the effect of the Lorentz invariance violation (LIV), which results in decay of high-energy gamma rays in the superluminal scenario and hence a sharp cutoff of the energy spectrum. Two highest energy sources are studied in this work. No signature of the existence of the LIV is found in their energy spectra, and the lower limits on the LIV energy scale are derived. Our results show that the first-order LIV energy scale should be higher than about 105 times the Planck scale M-Pl and that the second-order LIV scale is > 10(-3)M(Pl). Both limits improve by at least one order of magnitude the previous results.

Automated summary

The LHAASO Collaboration recently published the detection of 12 ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray sources above 100 TeV. By studying the energy spectra of the two highest energy sources, they found no evidence of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) and derived lower limits on the LIV energy scale. These results have significant implications for understanding LIV effects.