Speaker
Description
Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) can modify electromagnetic interactions at ultra-high energies and thereby affect the development of extensive air showers (EASs). We study a subluminal photon-sector LIV scenario in which Bethe–Heitler pair production is suppressed. Using LIV-modified EAS simulations, we model the resulting changes in the depth of shower maximum, $X_{\max}$, and reconstructed energy. The predictions are folded with the published Pierre Auger Observatory fluorescence-detector response and compared with the measured $X_{\max}$ distributions, allowing the primary composition to vary. Within this simplified analysis, we obtain the 95% confidence-level constraint $M_{\rm LIV}>1.5\times10^{21}\,\text{GeV}$, where $M_{\rm LIV}$ is the characteristic LIV energy scale in the photon sector. This result demonstrates the potential of hadron-induced EASs for probing photon-sector LIV.
This work was supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant 22-12-00253(P). The speaker acknowledges a PhD student fellowship from the Theoretical Physics and Mathematics Advancement Foundation “BASIS” under contract 24-2-10-39-1.
