Bonn 2020 – scientific programme

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T: Fachverband Teilchenphysik

T 102: Cosmic rays V

T 102.1: Talk

Friday, April 3, 2020, 11:00–11:15, L-3.001

Studies of Lorentz Violation using Air Shower Data — •Fabian Dünkel, Marcus Niechciol, and Markus Risse — Universität Siegen, Siegen, Germany

Due to their extremely high energies, cosmic rays are ideally suited to search for new physics, for example violations of Lorentz invariance. Isotropic, nonbirefringent Lorentz violation is considered in the following, specializing to the case of a photon velocity which is larger than the maximum attainable velocity of standard Dirac fermions. Earth-based bounds on this type of Lorentz violation have been determined before by observations of TeV gamma rays. A novel approach to test Lorentz invariance is based on the measurement of extensive air showers induced by cosmic-ray particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. Lorentz-violating processes can have a large impact on the longitudinal shower development of air showers, for example reducing the average atmospheric depth of the shower maximum Xmax. For showers with high primary energies, this change is significantly larger than the average resolution of current air-shower experiments. This can be used to obtain new bounds on this type of Lorentz violation, which can be further improved by taking into account composition constraints.

This work is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).