China's LHAASO set a new test record to once again validate Einstein's theory of relativity

Beijing News Shell Financial News (reporter Luo Yidan) On February 10, the official social platform of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a message that the LHAASO cooperation group of high-altitude cosmic ray experiments located in Daocheng, Sichuan, Mainland China, used its observation of high-energy gamma-ray cases to test lorentz symmetry, once again verifying the correctness of Einstein's relativity in space-time symmetry.

The High Altitude Cosmic Ray Observatory (LHAASO) located on the plateau at an altitude of 4410 meters Source: The official website of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Einstein's theory of relativity holds that matter in the universe cannot move faster than the speed of light. But in recent years, rhetoric questioning the correctness of Einstein's theory of relativity has persisted. Was Einstein right? This can be tested by the breaking of Lorentz's symmetry.

Recently, Bi Xiaojun, a researcher at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Zhang Yi and Yuan Qiang, researchers at the Purple Mountain Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, analyzed the high-energy gamma-ray data observed by the LHAASO experiment on the mainland, and the experimental results increased the energy scale of lorentz symmetry by about 10 times, which is the most stringent test of this type of Lorentz symmetry, and the observations once again verified the Lorentz symmetry. The findings were published in the latest issue of the Physical Review Letters (Phys. Rev. Lett.) on.

According to the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the principle of relativity requires that the laws of physics have Lorentz symmetry. In the more than 100 years since Einstein proposed the theory of relativity, the correctness of Lorentz's symmetry has undergone numerous experimental tests. However, there is an irreconcilable contradiction between general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes the laws of the microscopic world. Theoretical physicists have made unremitting efforts to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics, and have proposed different theories such as string theory and loop quantum gravity. These theories predict that Lorentz symmetry is likely to be broken at high energies, meaning that relativity may need to be revised at high energies. Therefore, the experimental search for signs of Lorentz symmetry failure becomes a "breakthrough" in testing relativity and finding more fundamental physical laws.

Because there are particles in the universe with much higher energies than artificial accelerators can accelerate, Lorentz symmetry failure will be more pronounced and easier to detect on these high-energy particles, so astrophysical observations become a natural laboratory for looking for Lorenz symmetry failure.

In this LHAASO observation, the Lorentz symmetry disruption will cause the high-energy photons to cease to be stable, and can quickly decay into a pair of positive and negative electron pairs or decay to 3 gamma photons. In other words, high-energy photons automatically disappear on their journey to Earth. "For observers on Earth, even if the celestial source has already emitted higher-energy photons, the photon energy spectrum we measured for this celestial body is suddenly cut off at this particular energy. LHAASO observational data show that the current gamma-ray spectrum has been continuing to high energy above the beat electron volt, and no "mysterious" disappearance of high-energy gamma cases has been found, indicating that the Lorentz symmetry is still correct near the Planck energy scale. Bi Xiaojun, a researcher at the Institute of High Energy of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a member of the LHAASO cooperation group and one of the corresponding authors of the paper, said.

It is understood that the high-altitude large-scale cosmic ray experiment LHAASO located in Daocheng, Sichuan Province, is a cosmic ray observation experiment independently designed and built by the mainland, and the construction in 2021 has not yet been completed to detect the highest energy gamma-ray photon known to mankind, with an energy of 1.4 beats of electron volts, refreshing this record at the same time, but also for exploring the basic laws of physics, strictly testing the correctness of Lorentz symmetry provides a rare opportunity.

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