Related papers: High-Energy gamma-ray Astronomy and String Theory
High-precision cosmological probes have revealed a small but significant tension between the parameters measured with different techniques, among which there is one based on time delays in gravitational lenses. We discuss a new way of using…
We examine 288 GRBs detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope's Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) that fell within the field-of-view of Fermi's Large Area Telescope (LAT) during the first 2.5 years of observations, which showed no…
Gamma-ray bursts are cosmological sources emitting radiation from the gamma-rays to the radio band. Substantial observational efforts have been devoted to the study of GRBs during the prompt phase, i.e. the initial burst of high-energy…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are a recently discovered class of GHz-band, ms-duration, Jy-level-flux astrophysical transients, which origin is still a mystery. Exploring their gamma-ray counterpart is crucial for constraining their origin and…
It has been suggested that energetic photons propagating in vacuo should experience a non-trivial refractive index due to the foamy structure of space-time induced by quantum-gravitational fluctuations. The sensitivity of recent…
Observations of gamma-ray bursts are being used to test for a momentum dependence of the speed of photons, partly motivated by preliminary results reported in analyses of some quantum-spacetime scenarios. The relationship between time of…
A possibility to describe quantum gravitational fluctuations of the spacetime background is provided by virtual $D$-branes. These effects may induce a tiny violation of the Lorentz invariance (as well as a possible violation of the…
The Fermi Large Area Telescope has provided the measurement of the high energy (20 GeV to 1 TeV) cosmic ray electrons and positrons spectrum with unprecedented accuracy. This measurement represents a unique probe for studying the origin and…
A property common to several different astrophysical sources of high-energy gamma-rays is the presence of bulk motion at relativistic speed. The intrinsic spectra of the nonthermal radiating particles also show interesting similarities,…
The light we receive from distant astrophysical objects carries information about their origins and the physical mechanisms that power them. The study of these signals, however, is complicated by the fact that observations are often a…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope with its main instrument onboard, the Large Area Telescope (LAT), opened a new era in high-energy astrophysics and in particular for the study of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs), which are short flashes of -rays…
We point out that each of the error boxes of the two highest-energy cosmic-ray shower events known, overlaps with that of a strong gamma-ray burst (GRB). The GRBs precede the cosmic rays by 5.5, and 11 months respectively. In one case the…
Recently, the MAGIC collaboration reported evidence for a delay in the arrival times of photons of different energies during a gamma-ray flare from the blazar Markarian 501 on 2005 July 9. We apply a homogeneous synchrotron self-Compton…
At Planck-scale, spacetime is "foamy" due to quantum fluctuations predicted by quantum gravity. Here we consider the possibility of using spacetime foam-induced phase incoherence of light from distant galaxies and gamma-ray bursters to…
The origin of the Fermi bubbles, which constitute two gamma-ray emitting lobes above and below the Galactic plane, remains unclear. The possibility that this Fermi bubbles gamma-ray emission originates from hadronic cosmic rays advected by…
The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope recently detected the most energetic gamma-ray burst so far, GRB 080916C, and reported its detailed temporal properties in an extremely broad spectral range: (i) the time-resolved spectra are well…
Modern ideas in quantum gravity predict the possibility of Lorenz Invariance Violation (LIV) manifested e.g. by energy dependent modification of standard relativistic dispersion relation. In a recent paper Jacob and Piran proposed that time…
I discuss a specific model of space-time foam, inspired by the modern non-perturbative approach to string theory (D-branes). The model views our world as a three brane, intersecting with D-particles that represent stringy quantum gravity…
Many quantum gravity theories imply that the vacuum is filled with virtual black holes. This paper explores the process in which high energy photons interact with virtual black holes and decay into gravitons and photons of lower energy. The…
Since its successful launch in June 2008, the {\it Fermi} Gamma-ray Space Telescope has made important breakthroughs in the understanding of the Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) phenomemon. The combination of the GBM and the LAT instruments onboard…