Study of Lorentz violation in INTEGRAL Gamma-Ray Bursts

TL;DR

This study investigates potential quantum gravitational effects on gamma-ray bursts by analyzing photon time lags with a new maximum likelihood method, providing constraints on quantum gravity energy scales.

Contribution

Introduces a novel unbinned maximum likelihood approach for detecting time lags in GRB data and challenges previous redshift-based linear fit assumptions.

Findings

Mass scale below Planck mass detected

Method enhances time resolution accuracy

Results suggest lower quantum gravity energy scale

Abstract

We search for possible time lags caused by quantum gravitational (QG) effects using gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) detected by INTEGRAL. The advantage of this satellite is that we have at our disposal the energy and arrival time of every detected single photon, which enhances the precision of the time resolution. We present a new method for seeking time lags in unbinned data using a maximum likelihood method and support our conclusions with Monte Carlo simulations. The analysis of the data yields a mass scale well below the Planck mass whose value may however increase if better statistics of GRBs were available. Furthermore, we disagree with previous studies in which a non-monotonic function of the redshift was used to perform a linear fit.