RUI: Investigations of Lorentz Violation

该RUI奖资助加州州立理工大学Matthew Mewes教授的研究活动。洛伦兹不变性被认为是自然界的一种精确对称性。它是狭义相对论的基础，意味着物理定律对所有观察者都是一样的。然而，试图将我们对自然的两种最基本的描述——粒子物理学的标准模型和广义相对论——统一为一个包罗一切的理论，表明洛伦兹不变性可能会被略微打破。Mewes教授的研究重点是违反洛伦兹不变性，其目标是扩展洛伦兹不变性违反的理论描述，并识别实验特征，以帮助寻找新的物理学。这项研究通过促进科学最基本的方向之一：发现和理解新的物理定律，从而提高了国家利益。这项工作的部分内容将对本科生开放，并将为加州理工学院的物理学专业学生提供研究机会。参与这项研究的学生也将获得有价值的理论物理接触。用更专业的术语来说，这个项目试图填补被称为标准模型扩展（SME）的理论框架中的几个主要空白。SME提供了任何系统中洛伦兹违逆的一般描述。这种方法的通用性意味着完整的SME包含无限数量的违规。为了使问题易于处理，早期的研究集中在最小SME上，这限制了对可重整质量维算子的关注。然而，有理由怀疑不可重整的违规可能占主导地位。该项目将通过完成线性化重力的扩展和探索该领域的各种后果来扩展我们对洛伦兹不变性违反的理解。它还试图通过分类费米子-光子相互作用中的违反来填补量子电动力学中洛伦兹违反扩展的空白。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This RUI award funds the research activities of Professor Matthew Mewes at California Polytechnic State University.Lorentz invariance is thought to be an exact symmetry of nature. It is the basis of special relativity and implies that the laws of physics are the same for all observers. However, attempts to unify our two most fundamental descriptions of nature, the Standard Model of particle physics and general relativity, into a single all-encompassing theory suggest that Lorentz invariance might be broken slightly. The research of Professor Mewes focuses on violations of Lorentz invariance, with the goal of extending the theoretical description of Lorentz-invariance violations and identifying experimental signatures in an effort to aid the search for new physics. This research advances the national interest by promoting science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of new physical laws. 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 also gain valuable exposure to theoretical physics.In more technical terms, this project seeks to fill several major gaps in the theoretical framework known as the Standard-Model-Extension (SME). The SME provides a general description of Lorentz violation in any system. The generality of this approach implies that the full SME contains an infinite number of violations. To keep the problem tractable, early studies 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. This project will extend our understanding of Lorentz-invariance violations by completing the extension for linearized gravity and by exploring various consequences in that sector. It also seeks to fill gaps in the Lorentz-violating extension of quantum electrodynamics by classifying violations in fermion-photon interactions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.