RUI: Studies of Lorentz Violation

RUI：洛伦兹破坏的研究

• 批准号: 1520570
• 负责人: Matthew Mewes
• 金额: $ 10.5万
• 依托单位: California Polytechnic State University Foundation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-09-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1520570&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RUI; Studies; Lorentz; Violation

This award funds the research activities of Professor Matthew Mewes at California Polytechnic State University.Lorentz invariance is the basis of Special Relativity and is thought to be an exact symmetry of nature. It is a feature of both the Standard Model of particle physics and General Relativity. Consequently, any violation of this basic principle would be a signal of new physics. Moreover, attempts to unify the Standard Model and General Relativity suggest Lorentz invariance might be slightly broken at low energies. The research of Professor Mewes focuses on the theoretical description of Lorentz-symmetry breaking and the identification of possible experimental signatures. The goal of this project is to extend existing theory to include a very broad class of Lorentz-invariance violations. To date, most studies of Lorentz violation have focused on the simplest minimal violations. This project aims to understand the theoretical and experimental significance of more general nonminimal violations. Research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical law. Moreover, parts of this work will be accessible to undergraduates and will provide research opportunities for physics majors at Cal Poly, a primarily undergraduate institution. Students involved in this research will gain valuable exposure to theoretical physics.In more technical terms, this project seeks to fill in several major gaps in the theoretical framework known as the Standard-Model-Extension (SME). The SME aims to provide a general description of Lorentz violation in any system. The generality of the approach implies that the full SME contains an infinite number of violations. To keep the problem tractable, most studies have focused on the minimal SME, which restricts attention to operators of renormalizable mass dimension. However, there are reasons to suspect that nonrenormalizable violations may dominate. Recent studies have systematically examined nonrenormalizable violations in photons and free fermions. This project will build on this work by studying violations in gauge interactions between photons and fermions. It will also extend our understanding of potential violations in gravity by considering higher-order nonminimal violations in General Relativity.

该奖项资助加州州立理工大学 Matthew Mewes 教授的研究活动。洛伦兹不变性是狭义相对论的基础，被认为是自然的精确对称性。它是粒子物理标准模型和广义相对论的一个特征。因此，任何违反这一基本原理的行为都将成为新物理学的信号。 此外，统一标准模型和广义相对论的尝试表明，洛伦兹不变性在低能量下可能会稍微被破坏。 Mewes教授的研究重点是洛伦兹对称性破缺的理论描述和可能的实验特征的识别。该项目的目标是扩展现有理论以包括非常广泛的洛伦兹不变性违规。 迄今为止，大多数洛伦兹破坏的研究都集中在最简单的最小破坏上。该项目旨在了解更一般的非最小违规行为的理论和实验意义。 该领域的研究通过促进科学在其最基本方向之一的进步来促进国家利益：发现和理解新的物理定律。 此外，这项工作的部分内容将向本科生开放，并将为加州理工大学（主要是本科院校）的物理专业提供研究机会。 参与这项研究的学生将获得对理论物理的宝贵接触。用更专业的术语来说，该项目旨在填补称为标准模型扩展（SME）的理论框架中的几个主要空白。 SME 旨在提供任何系统中洛伦兹破坏的一般描述。 该方法的通用性意味着完整的 SME 包含无限数量的违规行为。为了使问题易于处理，大多数研究都集中在最小 SME 上，这限制了对可重整质量维数算子的关注。 然而，有理由怀疑不可重整化违规可能占主导地位。 最近的研究系统地研究了光子和自由费米子中不可重整化的破坏。该项目将通过研究光子和费米子之间规范相互作用的违规行为来建立在这项工作的基础上。 它还将通过考虑广义相对论中的高阶非最小违反来扩展我们对潜在的引力违反的理解。