Low energy signatures of nonlocal field theories

TL;DR

This paper investigates how nonlocal field theories affect low-energy particle detector responses, revealing potential experimental signatures that could test quantum gravity models beyond current collider capabilities.

Contribution

It demonstrates that low-energy detectors can be highly sensitive to high-energy nonlocality scales, proposing a nuclear physics experiment to test quantum gravity effects.

Findings

Low-energy particle detectors are sensitive to high-energy nonlocality.

Proposed nuclear physics experiment surpasses LHC sensitivity.

Implications for testing quantum gravity theories.

Abstract

The response of inertial particle detectors coupled to a scalar field satisfying nonlocal dynamics described by nonanalytic functions of the d'Alembertian operator $\Box$ is studied. We show that spontaneous emission processes of a low energy particle detector are very sensitive to high-energy nonlocality scales. This allows us to suggest a nuclear physics experiment ($\sim$ MeV energy scales) that outperforms the sensitivity of LHC experiments by many orders of magnitude. This may have implications for the falsifiability of theoretical proposals of quantum gravity.