Bounds on the Polymer Scale from Gamma Ray Bursts

Abstract

The polymer representations, which are partially motivated by loop quantum gravity, have been suggested as alternative schemes to quantize the matter fields. Here we apply a version of the polymer representations to the free electromagnetic field, in a reduced phase space setting, and derive the corresponding effective (i.e., semiclassical) Hamiltonian. We study the propagation of an electromagnetic pulse and we confront our theoretical results with gamma ray burst observations. This comparison reveals that the dimensionless polymer scale must be smaller than $4\times 10^{-35}$, casting doubts on the possibility that the matter fields are quantized with the polymer representation we employed.

5 pages; Ver. 2: Two new references and some comments were added for more clarifications; Ver. 3: Based on referees' comments, some clarifications made in the text and the appendix, and a few citations added; Ver.4: final version matching PRD published article

References in corpus (12)

• GW170104: Observation of a 50-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence at Redshift 0.2
• Tests of general relativity with GW150914
• Electrodynamics with Lorentz-violating operators of arbitrary dimension
• Polymer Quantum Mechanics and its Continuum Limit
• Path Integrals and the WKB approximation in Loop Quantum Cosmology
• The propagator in polymer quantum field theory
• The Quantum Configuration Space of Loop Quantum Cosmology
• Background independent quantization and wave propagation
• Path integral polymer propagator of relativistic and non-relativistic particles
• Polymer inflation
• Polymer-Fourier quantization of the scalar field revisited
• Instanton solutions on the polymer harmonic oscillator

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Propagation of quantum gravity-modified gravitational waves on a classical FLRW spacetime
• Effective GUP-modified Raychaudhuri equation and black hole singularity: four models
• What do gravitational wave detectors say about polymer quantum effects?
• Casimir effect in polymer scalar field theory
• Quantum Groups and Polymer Quantum Mechanics
• Constraining the quantum gravity polymer scale using LIGO data