Vacuum Birefringence as a Probe of Planck Scale Noncommutativity
  Because of ultraviolet/infrared (UV/IR) mixing, the low energy physics of noncommutative gauge theories in the Moyal-Weyl approach seems to depend crucially on the details of the ultraviolet completion. However, motivated by recent string theory analyses, we argue that their phenomenology with a very general class of UV completions can be accurately modelled by a cutoff close to the Planck scale. In the infrared the theory tends continuously to the commutative gauge theory. If the photon contains contributions from a trace-U(1), we would observe vacuum birefringence, i.e. a polarisation dependent propagation speed, as a residual effect of the noncommutativity. Constraints on this effect require the noncommutativity scale to be close to the Planck scale. 
Steven A. Abel (Durham U.), Joerg Jaeckel (DESY), Valentin V. Khoze   (Durham U.), Andreas Ringwald (DESY)