RUI: Investigations of Lorentz Violation

California Polytechnic State University Foundation, San Luis Obispo CA

Investigators

Abstract

This RUI award funds the research activities of Professor Matthew Mewes at California Polytechnic State University. Lorentz invariance is thought to be an exact symmetry of nature. It is the basis of special relativity and implies that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. However, attempts to unify our two most fundamental descriptions of nature, the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity, into a single all-encompassing theory suggest that Lorentz invariance might be broken slightly. The research of Professor Mewes focuses on violations of Lorentz invariance, with the goal of extending the theoretical description of Lorentz-invariance violations and identifying experimental signatures in an effort to aid the search for new physics. This research advances the national interest by promoting science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical laws. Parts of this work will be accessible to undergraduates and will provide research opportunities for physics majors at Cal Poly, a primarily undergraduate institution. Students involved in this research will also gain valuable exposure to theoretical physics. In more technical terms, this project seeks to fill several major gaps in the theoretical framework known as the Standard-Model-Extension (SME). The SME provides a general description of Lorentz violation in any system. The generality of this approach implies that the full SME contains an infinite number of violations. To keep the problem tractable, early studies focused on the minimal SME, which restricts attention to operators of renormalizable mass dimension. However, there are reasons to suspect that nonrenormalizable violations may dominate. This project will extend our understanding of Lorentz-invariance violations by completing the extension for linearized gravity and by exploring various consequences in that sector. It also seeks to fill gaps in the Lorentz-violating extension of quantum electrodynamics by classifying violations in fermion-photon interactions. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.