A Bound on Violations of Lorentz Invariance

Abstract

Recently Coleman and Glashow [1] have developed a model which allows the introduction of a small violation of Lorentz invariance. Observational signatures arise because this interaction also violates flavor conservation and allows the radiative decay of the muon, $\mu \to e+\gamma$, whose branching ratio increases as b ${\gamma }^4$ where $\gamma$ is the Lorentz factor of the muon with respect to the reference frame in which the dipole anisotropy of the universal microwave radiation vanishes. In this paper we place a bound of b$<10^{-25}$ based on observations of horizontal air showers with $n_e\ge 5\times 10^6$. With such small values of b the proposed radiative decay of the muon will not affect the functioning of the muon collider.(THIS IS A PRELIMINARY VERSION)

Comments: 7 pages, 1 figure