New constraints on space-time Planck scale fluctuations from established high energy astronomy observations

Abstract

The space-time metric is widely believed to be subject to stochastic fluctuations induced by quantum gravity at the Planck scale. This work is based on two different phenomenological approaches being currently made to this topic, and theoretical models which describe this phenomenon are not dealt with here. By using the idea developed in one of these two approaches in the framework of the other one, it is shown that the constraints on the nature of Planck scale space-time fluctuations already set by the observation of electrons and gamma-rays with energies above 15 TeV are much stronger than have been shown so far. It is concluded that for the kind of Planck scale fluctuations implied by several models, including the most naive one, to be consistent with the observations, the transformation laws between different reference frames must be modified in order to let the Planck scale be observer-independent.