A bound on Planck-scale modifications of the energy-momentum composition rule from atomic interferometry

Abstract

High-sensitivity measurements in atomic spectroscopy were recently used by Amelino- Camelia et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett., 103 (2009) 171302) to constraint the form of possible modifications of the energy-momentum dispersion relation resulting from Lorentz invariance violation (LIV). In this letter we show that the same data can be used successfully to set experimental bounds on deformations of the energy-momentum composition rule. Such modifications are natural in models of deformed Lorentz symmetry which are relevant in certain quantum gravity scenarios. We find the bound for the deformation parameter κ to be a few orders of magnitude below the Planck scale and of the same magnitude as the next-to-leading–order effect found by Amelino-Camelia et al. in the above-mentioned paper. We briefly discuss how it would be possible to distinguish between these two scenarios.