Causality and stability for Lorentz-CPTviolating electrodynamics with dimension-5 operators

Abstract

Stringent limits on the Myers-Pospelov timelike parameter for photons $\xi<10^{-15}$ coming from astrophysical tests suggest exploring more general preferred backgrounds, such as spacelike and lightlike. We take some steps in this direction. We allow the external four vector $n$ characterizing the Lorentz symmetry breaking to have arbitrary directions in spacetime. We study the consistency for the effective field theories in each privileged frame by demanding causality, stability and analyticity. When specializing to a timelike background we found runaway solutions leading to causality and unitarity violations. We show that the lightlike theory is a higher-derivative theory with more degrees of freedom and nonanalytic solutions leading to instabilities when interactions are turned on. We demonstrate by explicit calculation that both stability and analyticity are preserved for the purely spacelike case while microcausality is highly suppressed. This new anisotropic model opens the possibility to play a role in the search for Planck-scale effects.