Related papers: Light Speed Variation with Brane/String-Inspired S…
We argue that in fat brane-world scenarios the light propagating in vacuum will, because of massive ``Kaluza-Klein'' (KK) excitations, experience a refraction. The motion of a photon inside a fat brane can be decomposed in the longitudinal…
For a sample of Swift and Fermi GRBs, we show that the minimum variability timescale and the spectral lag of the prompt emission is related to the bulk Lorentz factor in a complex manner: For small $\Gamma$'s, the variability timescale…
Energy-dependent speeds of light have been considered an observable signature of quantum gravity effects. The two simplest dispersion relationships produce either linear or quadratic corrections, in particle energy, to the photon speed. The…
We study cosmologies in the Randall-Sundrum models, incorporating the possibility of time-varying speed of light and Newton's constant. The cosmologies with varying speed of light (VSL) were proposed by Moffat and by Albrecht and Magueijo…
Though many experiments appear to have confirmed the light speed invariance postulate of special relativity theory, this postulate is actually unverified. This paper resolves this issue by first showing the manner in which an illusion of…
Doubly Special Relativity (DSR) theories consider (quantum-gravity motivated) deformations of the symmetries of special relativity compatible with a relativity principle. The existence of time delays for massless particles, one of their…
We study cosmological implications of a Lorentz invariance violating DGP-inspired braneworld scenario. A minimally coupled scalar field and a single, fixed-norm, Lorentz-violating timelike vector field within an interactive picture provide…
It has been known that dimensional constants such as $\hbar$, $c$, $G$, $e$, and $k$ are merely human constructs whose values and units vary depending on the chosen system of measurement. Therefore, the time variation of dimensional…
The observed delay in the arrival times between high and low energy photons in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) has been shown by Norris et al. to be correlated to the absolute luminosity of a GRB. Despite the apparent importance of this spectral…
If gamma-ray bursts are associated with dense star-forming regions in young galaxies, photoelectric absorption by the dense circumburster material (CBM) will occur. As the burst evolves, the surrounding material is photoionized, leading to…
The speed of light in vacuum, $c$, is a fundamental constant of nature. Photons belonging to a structured beam of finite transverse size, generated by a spatial light modulator, have been observed to travel with a group velocity, $v_g$,…
Deformed special relativity (DSR) is one of the possible realizations of a varying speed of light (VSL). It deforms the usual quadratic dispersion relations so that the speed of light becomes energy dependent, with preferred frames avoided…
Lorentz Invariance Violation (LIV) arises in various quantum-gravity theories. As the typical energy for quantum gravity is the Planck mass, $M_{pl}$, LIV will, most likely, be manifested at very high energies that are not accessible on…
Theories of modified gravity suggest that the propagation speed of gravitational wave (GW) $v_g$ may deviate from the speed of light $c$. A constraint can be placed on the difference between $c$ and $v_g$ with a simple method that uses the…
We study spatial variations of the fine-structure constant in the presence of static straight cosmic strings in the weak-field approximation in Einstein gravity. We work in the context of a generic Bekenstein-type model and consider a gauge…
The gravitational time delays of macro-lenses can be used to constrain the rest mass of the photon with high accuracy. Assuming a point-mass $+$ external shear lens model, we prove that an upper limit of the photon mass can be derived…
Quantum speed limits of relativistic charged spin-0 and spin-1 bosons in the background of a homogeneous magnetic field are studied on both commutative and oncommutative planes. We show that, on the commutative plane, the average speeds of…
If textbook Lorentz invariance is actually a property of the equations describing a sector of the excitations of vacuum above some critical distance scale, several sectors of matter with different critical speeds in vacuum can coexist and…
The notion of a space-time uncertainty principle in string theory is clarified and further developed. The motivation and the derivation of the principle are first reviewed in a reasonably self-contained way. It is then shown that the…
We consider a prescription for introducing deformed dispersion relations in the bosonic string action. We find that in a subset of such theories it remains true that the embedding coordinates propagate linearly on the worldsheet. While both…