The existence of manifestly breaks Lorentz invariance and hence the size of
is constrained
by tests of Lorentz violation. However, in order to match a non-commutative theory to low energy
observations, we must have the appropriate low energy theory, which implies that the infamous UV/IR
mixing problem of non-commutative field theory must be tamed enough to create a well-defined low energy
expansion. No general method for doing this is known, although supersymmetry [216
] can perhaps do the
trick.9
If the UV/IR mixing is present but regulated by a cutoff, then the resulting field theory can be re-expressed
in terms of the mSME [31
, 75
].
In order to see how constraints come about, consider for the moment non-commutative QED.
The Seiberg-Witten map [254] can be used to express the non-commutative fields in terms
of ordinary gauge fields. At lowest order in
the effective action for low energy is then
Other strong constraints can be derived by noting that without a custodial symmetry loop effects with
the dimension six operators will induce lower dimension operators. In [31], the authors calculated what
dimension four operators would be generated, assuming that the field theory has some cutoff scale
. The
dimension six operators induce dimension four operators of the form
and
, where
are dimensionless numbers that depend on
. There are two
different regimes of behavior for
. If
then
are
(up to loop factors
and coupling coefficients), independent of the scale
. Such strong Lorentz violation is
obviously ruled out by current experiment, implying that in this perturbative approach such a
limit is observationally not viable. If instead one takes
then
. The
resulting field theory becomes a subset of the standard model extension; specifically the new
operators have the form of the
term in Equation (35
). It has been argued [75]
that any realistic non-commutative theory must eventually reduce to part of the mSME. The
approach of [31] shows this is possible, although the presence of such a low energy cutoff must be
explained.
All of the above approaches use an expansion in to get some low energy effective field theory.
In terms of Lorentz tests, the results are all based upon this EFT expansion and not on the full
non-commutative theory. Therefore we will restrict ourselves to discussing limits on various terms in
effective field theories rather than directly quoting limits on the non-commutative scale. We
leave it up to the reader to translate this value into a constraint (if any) on
and or
.
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