Strong constraints on Lorentz violation using new $\gamma$-ray observations around PeV

Abstract

The tiny modification of dispersion relation induced by Lorentz violation (LV) is an essential issue in quantum gravity (QG) theories, which can be magnified into significant effects when dealing with astrophysical observations at high energy and long propagation distance. LV would lead to photon decay at high energies, therefore, observations of high-energy photons could constrain LV or even QG theories. The Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) is the most sensitive gamma-array instrument currently operating above 100 TeV. Recently, LHAASO reported the detection of 12 sources above 100 TeV with maximum photon energy exceeding 1 PeV. According to these observations, the most stringent restriction is achieved in this paper, i.e., limiting the LV energy scale to $1.7\times10^{33} $ eV, which is over 139,000 times that of the Planck energy and achieve an improvement of about 1.9 orders of magnitude over previous limits.