What If Lorentz Invariance Violation Were Detected?

[rodsika]

What if someday we would have news that Lorentz Invariance Violation was detected? Is this possible at all? But our Special Relativity is based on Lorentz Invariance and the more general General Covariance in General Relativity. Does this mean that Lorentz Invariance violation is almost impossible? But how come there are still many tests that look for it. What if they found one. How do you reconcile it with the fact that most experiments obey lorentz invariance. Are you saying that if they found a violation, it is possible a preferred frame exists in some way but lorentz invariance stays in some frame??

 

[Vanadium 50]

I don't think this is answerable.

 

[jtbell]

The original title of this thread ("Lorentz Invariance Violation Detected") is misleading, because no such violation has been detected, nor does the OP claim that one has been detected. I've changed it accordingly.

 

[Cleonis]

What if someday we would have news that Lorentz Invariance Violation was detected? Is this possible at all?

Take for comparison the cases of parity violation and CP-violation. Both discoveries were unexpected.
Discovering Lorentz invariance violation would be an even bigger surprise, but the possibility can't be excluded.

That said, it does seem that if any Lorentz invariance violation would exist we would have encountered it by now. So it does seem like a very very remote possibility, becoming more and more remote as experiments push on.


Discovering a case of Lorentz invariance violation would not necessarily have any consequences for General Relativity. One way of expressing that is as follows: the defining principle of GR is the principle of equivalance. The principle of equivalence and Lorentz invariance are not in any way interdependent. Hence finding a Lorentz invariance violation for some non-gravitational interaction would be inconsequential for GR.

 

[JesseM]

There are apparently some extensions of the Standard Model that allow for Lorentz symmetry to be violated, although I think the symmetry is broken by spontaneous symmetry breaking which means the theory would have been symmetric in the era when the forces were unified, and the symmetry was broken by a random decay to different vacuum state. So if I'm understanding this right, there wouldn't be any asymmetry in the fundamental laws of physics, just in the particular vacuum state which our region of the universe has, which was fixed by contingent events in the past. This article discusses such lorentz-symmetry-violating extensions of the Standard Model in more detail:

http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/788493/files/presscut-2004-168s.pdf?version=1