New Limits on the Photon Mass with Radio Pulsars in the Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

A conservative constraint on the rest mass of the photon can be estimated under the assumption that the frequency dependence of dispersion from astronomical sources is mainly contributed by the nonzero photon mass effect. Photon mass limits have been earlier set through the optical emissions of the Crab Nebula pulsar, but we prove that these limits can be significantly improved with the dispersion measure (DM) measurements of radio pulsars in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The combination of DM measurements of pulsars and distances of the Magellanic Clouds provide a strict upper limit on the photon mass as low as $m_{\gamma }\le 2.0\times 10^{-45}\mathrm{g}$, which is at least four orders of magnitude smaller than the constraint from the Crab Nebula pulsar. Although our limit is not as tight as the current best result ($\sim 10^{-47}\mathrm{g}$) from a fast radio burst (FRB 150418) at a cosmological distance, the cosmological origin of FRB 150418 remains under debate; and our limit can reach the same high precision of FRB 150418 when it has an extragalactic origin ($\sim 10^{-45}\mathrm{g}$).

6 pages, no figure. Accepted for publication in RAA

References in corpus (1)

• Discovery of 14 radio pulsars in a survey of the Magellanic Clouds

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• The BINGO Project I: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations from Integrated Neutral Gas Observations
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• Testing the Ampère-Maxwell law on the photon mass and Lorentz-Poincaré symmetry violation with MMS multi-spacecraft data
• Bounding the Photon Mass with Ultrawide Bandwidth Pulsar Timing Data and Dedispersed Pulses of Fast Radio Bursts
• Residual gauge-invariance in a massive Lorentz-violating extension of QED
• Bounding the photon mass with cosmological propagation of fast radio bursts