Revisiting Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Absorption in Cosmic Propagation under the Combined Effects of Axion-Like Particles and Lorentz Invariance Violation

TL;DR

This paper explores a combined scenario involving axion-like particles and Lorentz invariance violation to explain the unexpected transparency of the universe to very-high-energy gamma rays, based on recent GRB observations.

Contribution

It introduces a joint propagation model incorporating both ALP-photon mixing and LIV effects, demonstrating their combined impact on gamma-ray survival over cosmological distances.

Findings

ALPs with specific coupling and mass improve gamma-ray transparency.

Quadratic LIV effects further enhance photon survival probabilities.

Combined ALP-LIV effects better explain extreme-energy gamma-ray observations.

Abstract

Very-high-energy (VHE; $E \gtrsim 100$ GeV) gamma rays are expected to experience strong attenuation during cosmological propagation due to electron-positron pair production on the extragalactic background light (EBL). Recent observations of GRB 221009A (z = 0.151), including photons up to $\sim 18$ detected by LHAASO and a $\sim 300\ \mathrm{TeV}$ event reported by Carpet-3, suggest a higher-than-expected transparency of the Universe at extreme energies. These observations cannot be explained by standard EBL absorption alone; moreover, neither Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) nor photon-axion-like particle (ALP) oscillations, when considered in isolation, appear sufficient to account for the survival of such photons over cosmological distances. In this work, we propose a joint propagation scenario that incorporates photon-ALP mixing in astrophysical magnetic fields together with subluminal quadratic LIV corrections to the $\gamma\gamma$ pair-production threshold. Applying this framework to the broadband gamma-ray spectrum of GRB 221009A, we show that ALPs with coupling ($g_{a\gamma} = 1.685 \times 10^{-10}\mathrm{GeV}^{-1}$ ) and mass ($m_a = 9.545 \times 10^{-8}\mathrm{eV}$), combined with a quadratic LIV energy scale ($E_{\rm LIV,2} = 1.30 \times 10^{-7} E_{\rm Pl}$) adopted from the literature, can significantly enhance the photon survival probability in the energy range (10\text{-}300) TeV. The resulting enhancement exceeds that obtained from either ALP mixing or LIV effects alone. These results indicate that a combined ALP-LIV scenario may provide a viable interpretation of the extreme-energy gamma-ray observations of GRB 221009A and highlight the potential of VHE gamma-ray measurements as probes of physics beyond the Standard Model.