Einstein-aether as a quantum effective field theory

Abstract

The possibility that Lorentz symmetry is violated in gravitational processes is relatively unconstrained by experiment, in stark contrast with the level of accuracy to which Lorentz symmetry has been confirmed in the matter sector. One model of Lorentz violation in the gravitational sector is Einstein-aether theory, in which Lorentz symmetry is broken by giving a vacuum expectation value to a dynamical vector field. In this paper, we analyse the effective theory for quantized gravitational and aether perturbations. We show that this theory possesses a controlled effective expansion within dimensional regularization, that is, for any process there are a finite number of Feynman diagrams which will contribute to a given order of accuracy. We find that there is no log running of the 2-derivative phenomenological parameters, justifying the use of experimental constraints for these parameters obtained over many orders of magnitude in energy scale. Given the stringent experimental bounds on 2-derivative Lorentz-violating operators, we estimate the size of matter Lorentz violation which arises due to loop effects. This amounts to an estimation of the natural size of coefficients for Lorentz-violating dimension-6 matter operators, which in turn can be used to obtain a new bound on the 2-derivative parameters of this theory.