Testing Lorentz Invariance with GRB 021206

Abstract

Since the discovery of the cosmological origin of GRBs there has been growing interest in using these transient events to probe the quantum gravity energy scale in the range 10^16--10^19 GeV, up to the Planck mass scale. This energy scale can manifest itself through a measurable modification in the electromagnetic radiation dispersion relation for high energy photons originating from cosmological distances. We have used data from the gamma-ray burst (GRB) of 6 December 2002 (GRB021206) to place an upper bound on the energy dispersion of the speed of light. The limit on the first-order quantum gravity effects derived from this single GRB indicate that the energy scale is in excess of 1.8x10^17 GeV. We discuss a program to further constrain the energy scale by systematically studying such GRBs.