Constraint on Lorentz invariance violation from Vela pulsar

Abstract

The High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) Collaboration reported the discovery of a novel radiation component from the Vela pulsar by their Cherenkov telescopes. It is of great importance that gamma rays with energies of at least 20 TeV are recorded unexpectedly. The H.E.S.S. Collaboration argued that such results may challenge the state-of-the-art models for the high-energy emission of pulsars. We point out in this work that these results also provide a unique opportunity to constrain certain Lorentz invariance violation parameters, leading to the realization of studying Lorentz invariance violation by using gamma-ray pulsars. The Lorentz invariance violation scale is constrained at the level of E_LV,1 > 1.66 × 10^17GeV for the linear scenario, and E_LV,2 > 3.53 × 10^10GeV for the quadratic scenario. We anticipate that digging into the detailed features of the data of the Vela pulsar and analyzing potentially more very-high-energy photon data from pulsars in the future would improve the constraints on Lorentz invariance violation.