Lorentz violation and the electron-ion collider

TL;DR

This paper explores how future electron-ion colliders could detect Lorentz symmetry violations by analyzing deep inelastic scattering data, potentially setting bounds much tighter than current limits.

Contribution

It demonstrates the potential of the electron-ion collider to improve bounds on Lorentz violation coefficients in the quark sector using simulated data.

Findings

Expected bounds on Lorentz violation coefficients are in the 10^{-5} to 10^{-7} range.

Bounds could be two orders of magnitude stronger than current limits from HERA.

Analysis includes prospects for both sidereal time-dependent and independent coefficients.

Abstract

We investigate the prospects for detecting violations of Lorentz symmetry in unpolarized deep inelastic electron-proton scattering in the context of the future electron-ion collider. Simulated differential cross-section data are used to place expected bounds on a class of quark-sector coefficients for Lorentz violation that induce sidereal time dependence in the scattering cross section. We find that, with $100 \; {\rm fb}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity, the expected bounds are in the $10^{-5}-10^{-7}$ range and are roughly two orders of magnitude stronger than those that can be extracted from existing HERA data. We also discuss the possibility of extracting bounds on the remaining time-independent coefficients.