Since the discovery of the cosmological origin of GRBs there has been growing interest in using these transient events to probe the quantum gravity energy scale in the range 10^16--10^19 GeV, up to the Planck mass scale. This energy scale can manifest itself through a measurable modification in the electromagnetic radiation dispersion relation for high energy photons originating from cosmological distances. We have used data from the gamma-ray burst (GRB) of 6 December 2002 (GRB021206) to place an upper bound on the energy dispersion of the speed of light. The limit on the first-order quantum gravity effects derived from this single GRB indicate that the energy scale is in excess of 1.8x10^17 GeV. We discuss a program to further constrain the energy scale by systematically studying such GRBs.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0310307,
title = {Testing Lorentz Invariance with GRB021206},
author = {Steven E. Boggs and Cornelia B. Wunderer and Kevin Hurley and Wayne Coburn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0310307},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
10 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJL