Astrophysical constraints on Planck scale dissipative phenomena.

The emergence of a classical spacetime from any quantum gravity model is still a subtle and only partially understood issue. If indeed spacetime is arising as some sort of large scale condensate of more fundamental objects, then it is natural to expect that matter, being a collective excitation of the spacetime constituents, will present modified kinematics at sufficiently high energies. We consider here the phenomenology of the dissipative effects necessarily arising in such a picture. Adopting dissipative hydrodynamics as a general framework for the description of the energy exchange between collective excitations and the spacetime fundamental degrees of freedom, we discuss how rates of energy loss for elementary particles can be derived from dispersion relations and used to provide strong constraints on the base of current astrophysical observations of high-energy particles.

Three-dimensional model of cosmic-ray lepton propagation reproduces data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station.

We study the compatibility of Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) data on the cosmic-ray (CR) positron fraction with data on the CR electron and positron spectra provided by PAMELA and Fermi LAT. We do that in terms of a novel propagation model in which sources are distributed in spiral arm patterns in agreement with astrophysical observations. While former interpretations assumed an unrealistically steep injection spectrum for astrophysical background electrons, the enhanced energy losses experienced by CR leptons due to the larger average source distance from Earth allow us to reproduce the data with harder injection spectra as expected in a shock acceleration scenario. Moreover, we show that in this approach, and accounting for AMS-02 results, the contribution of nearby accelerators to the fluxes at very high energy can be significantly reduced, thus avoiding any tension with anisotropy upper limits.

Low energy cosmic ray positron fraction explained by charge-sign dependent solar modulation.

We compute cosmic ray (CR) nuclei, proton, antiproton, electron, and positron spectra below 1 TeV at Earth by means of a detailed transport description in the galaxy and in the solar system. CR spectra below 10 GeV are strongly modified by charge-sign dependent propagation effects. These depend on the polarity of the solar magnetic field and therefore vary with the solar cycle. The puzzling discrepancy between the low-energy positron fraction measured by PAMELA and AMS-01 is then easily explained by their different data-taking epochs. We reproduce the observed spectra of CR light nuclei within the same galactic and solar-system propagation model.

Scale hierarchy in Horava-Lifshitz gravity: strong constraint from synchrotron radiation in the Crab Nebula.

Horava-Lifshitz gravity models contain higher-order operators suppressed by a characteristic scale, which is required to be parametrically smaller than the Planck scale. We show that recomputed synchrotron radiation constraints from the Crab Nebula suffice to exclude the possibility that this scale is of the same order of magnitude as the Lorentz breaking scale in the matter sector. This highlights the need for a mechanism that suppresses the percolation of Lorentz violation in the matter sector and is effective for higher-order operators as well.

Common solution to the cosmic ray anisotropy and gradient problems.

Multichannel cosmic ray spectra and the large scale cosmic ray anisotropy can hardly be made compatible in the framework of conventional isotropic and homogeneous propagation models. These models also have problems explaining the longitude distribution and the radial emissivity gradient of the γ-ray Galactic interstellar emission. We argue here that accounting for a physically motivated correlation between the cosmic ray escape time and the spatially dependent magnetic turbulence power can naturally solve both problems. Indeed, by exploiting this correlation we find propagation models that fit a wide set of cosmic ray spectra, and consistently reproduce the cosmic ray anisotropy in the energy range 10(2)-10(4) GeV and the γ-ray longitude distribution recently measured by Fermi-LAT.

Ultrahigh-energy photons as probes of Lorentz symmetry violations in stringy space-time foam models.

The time delays between γ rays of different energies from extragalactic sources have often been used to probe quantum gravity models in which Lorentz symmetry is violated. It has been claimed that these time delays can be explained by or at least put the strongest available constraints on quantum gravity scenarios that cannot be cast within an effective field theory framework, such as the space-time foam, D-brane model. Here we show that this model would predict too many photons in the ultrahigh energy cosmic ray flux to be consistent with observations. The resulting constraints on the space-time foam model are much stronger than limits from time delays and allow for Lorentz violation effects way too small for explaining the observed time delays.