A Further Test of Lorentz Violation from the Rest-frame Spectral Lags of Gamma-Ray Bursts

Abstract

Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) can manifest itself by an energy-dependent vacuum dispersion of light, which leads to arrival time differences of photons with different energies originating from the same astronomical source. The spectral lags of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been widely used to investigate the possible LIV effect. However, all current investigations used lags extracted in the observer frame only. In this work, we present, for the first time, an analysis of the LIV effect and its redshift dependence in the cosmological rest frame. Using a sample of 56 GRBs with known redshifts, we obtain a robust limit on LIV by fitting their rest-frame spectral lag data using both a maximization of the likelihood function and a minimum χ 2 statistic. Our analysis indicates that there is no evidence of LIV. Additionally, we test the LIV in different redshift ranges by dividing the full sample into four redshift bins. We also find no evidence for the redshift variation of the LIV effect.