Optical-cavity tests of higher-order Lorentz violation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how optical resonant cavities can detect higher-order Lorentz violations, demonstrating they are far more sensitive than microwave experiments, with existing setups already providing significant constraints.

Contribution

It shows that optical-frequency experiments can vastly improve sensitivity to certain Lorentz-violating operators compared to microwave-based tests.

Findings

Optical cavities are highly sensitive to nondispersive nonbirefringent Lorentz violations.

Existing optical experiments already set strong constraints on these violations.

Optical tests surpass microwave cavity experiments by many orders of magnitude.

Abstract

The effects of Lorentz-violating operators of nonrenormalizable dimension in optical resonate cavities are studied. Optical-frequency experiments are shown to provide sensitivity to nondispersive nonbirefringent violations that is many orders of magnitude beyond current constraints from microwave cavities. Existing experiments based on Fabry-Perot and ring resonators are considered as illustrations.