Quantum corrections in the Myers-Pospelov model: a progress report

Abstract

The Myers-Pospelov (MP) model is an effective field theory (EFT), including dimension five operators, which describes the phenomenology of active Lorentz invariance violation produced by a preferred reference frame. We concentrate here in the case of the modified electrodynamics. The point of view taken in this work is that the Lorentz violating part of the action in the MP model, which includes higher order time derivative (HOTD) operators, is to be considered as a perturbation over the dynamics described by standard Electrodynamics, particularly in the quantum case. HOTD theories, besides incorporating additional degrees of freedom, suffer from well known difficulties in their quantization, among which one finds Hamiltonians which are not bounded from below. Thus, in order to cope with these challenges it will be necessary to deal with a modified perturbation theory which is well described in the literature. We apply such methods to this specific model providing a quantization of the free sector of the theory by identifying the modified normal mode expansions of the fields together with the modified propagators and the interaction terms. The calculation of interacting processes, together with radiative corrections, is beyond the scope of the present article and will be deferred for future publications. From Quantum to Emergent Gravity: Theory and Phenomenology