GLAST and Lorentz violation

Abstract

We study possible Lorentz violations by means of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) with special focus on the Large Array Telescope (LAT) of GLAST. We simulate bursts with gtobssim and introduce a Lorentz violating term in the arrival times of the photons. We further perturb these arrival times and energies with a Gaussian distribution corresponding to the time resp. energy resolution of GLAST. We then vary the photon flux in gtobssim in order to derive a relation between the photon number and the standard deviation of the Lorentz violating term. We conclude with the fact that our maximum likelihood method as first developed in [1] is able to make a statement whether Nature breaks the Lorentz symmetry if the number of bursts with known redshifts is of the order of 100.

13 pages, 8 figures and 2 tables, Accepted for publication by JCAP after a couple of revisions