Nonlinear QED and Physical Lorentz Invariance

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that apparent Lorentz invariance violation in nonlinear QED is only a gauge choice, with all physical interactions remaining Lorentz invariant after cancellations, extending previous tree-level results to one-loop order.

Contribution

It shows that Lorentz invariance breaking in nonlinear QED is a gauge artifact, with all violations canceling out at the quantum level, including one-loop corrections.

Findings

Lorentz violation terms cancel at one-loop order.

Physical Lorentz invariance remains intact despite nonlinear constraints.

The gauge nature of Lorentz violation is confirmed beyond tree level.

Abstract

The spontaneous breakdown of 4-dimensional Lorentz invariance in the framework of QED with the nonlinear vector potential constraint A_{\mu}^{2}=M^{2}(where M is a proposed scale of the Lorentz violation) is shown to manifest itself only as some noncovariant gauge choice in the otherwise gauge invariant (and Lorentz invariant) electromagnetic theory. All the contributions to the photon-photon, photon-fermion and fermion-fermion interactions violating the physical Lorentz invariance happen to be exactly cancelled with each other in the manner observed by Nambu a long ago for the simplest tree-order diagrams - the fact which we extend now to the one-loop approximation and for both the time-like (M^{2}>0) and space-like (M^{2}<0) Lorentz violation. The way how to reach the physical breaking of the Lorentz invariance in the pure QED case taken in the flat Minkowskian space-time is also discussed in some detail.