English

Testing the Amp\`ere-Maxwell law on the photon mass and Lorentz-Poincar\'e symmetry violation with MMS multi-spacecraft data

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2024-06-27 v6 High Energy Physics - Theory Plasma Physics Space Physics

Abstract

We investigate possible evidence from Extended Theories of Electro-Magnetism by looking for deviations from the Amp\`ere-Maxwell law. The photon, main messenger for interpreting the universe, is the only free massless particle in the Standard-Model (SM). Indeed, the deviations may be due to a photon mass for the de Broglie-Proca (dBP) theory or the Lorentz Symmetry Violation (LSV) in the SM Extension (SME), but also to non-linearities from theories as of Born-Infeld, Heisenberg-Euler. With this aim, we have analysed six years of data of the Magnetospheric Multi-Scale mission, which is a four-satellite constellation, crossing mostly turbulent regions of magnetic reconnection and collecting about 95%95\% of the downloaded data, outside the solar wind. We examined 3.8 million data points from the solar wind, magnetosheath, and magnetosphere regions. In a minority of cases, for the highest time resolution burst data and optimal tetrahedron configurations drawn by the four spacecraft, deviations have been found (2.2%2.2\% in modulus and 4.8%4.8\% in Cartesian components for all regions, but raising up in the solar wind alone to 20.8%20.8\% in modulus and 29.7%29.7\% in Cartesian components and up to 45.2\% in the extreme low-mass range). The deviations might be due to unaccounted experimental errors or, less likely, to non-Maxwellian contributions, for which we have inferred the related parameters for the dBP and SME cases. Possibly, we are at the boundaries of measurability for non-dedicated missions. We discuss our experimental results (upper limit of photon mass of 2.1×10512.1 \times 10^{-51} kg, and of the LSV parameter kAF|\vec{k}^{\rm AF}| of 6×1096 \times 10^{-9} m1^{-1}), as the deviations in the solar wind, versus more stringent but model-dependent limits.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.02487,
  title  = {Testing the Amp\`ere-Maxwell law on the photon mass and Lorentz-Poincar\'e symmetry violation with MMS multi-spacecraft data},
  author = {Alessandro D. A. M. Spallicci and Giuseppe Sarracino and Orélien Randriamboarison and José A. Helayël-Neto and Abedennour Dib},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.02487},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted by Eur. Phys. J. Plus. The combination of plasma and fundamental physics opens a new field. Results: A) An upper limit very close to last FRB observations; B) Many deviations from the Amp\`ere-Maxwell law in the solar wind due to experimental errors or to non-Maxwellian terms. Deviations question the model based upper limits by Ryutov (1997, 2007) adopted by the Particle Data Group