Constraining the Mass of the Photon with Gamma-Ray Bursts
Abstract
One of the cornerstones of modern physics is Einstein's special relativity, with its constant speed of light and zero photon mass assumptions. Constraint on the rest mass m_{\gamma} of photons is a fundamental way to test Einstein's theory, as well as other essential electromagnetic and particle theories. Since non-zero photon mass can give rise to frequency-(or energy-) dependent dispersions, measuring the time delay of photons with different frequencies emitted from explosive astrophysical events is an important and model-independent method to put such a constraint. The cosmological gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), with short time scales, high redshifts as well as broadband prompt and afterglow emissions, provide an ideal testbed for m_{\gamma} constraints. In this paper we calculate the upper limits of the photon mass with GRB early time radio afterglow observations as well as multi-band radio peaks, thus improve the results of Schaefer (1999) by nearly half an order of magnitude.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1607.03225,
title = {Constraining the Mass of the Photon with Gamma-Ray Bursts},
author = {Bo Zhang and Ya-Ting Chai and Yuan-Chuan Zou and Xue-Feng Wu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.03225},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
25 pages, 2 tables, Accepted by Journal of High Energy Astrophysics