# Searching for Granularity of the Vacuum

## I Introduction

Translational invariance of the vacuum is a sacred tenet of physics. One might suspect that, near the Planck scale, space may be grainy due, say, to condensates, quantum black holes, a spatially varying $`\theta `$ parameter, or phase decorrelation of virtual modes. This raises the question of whether on such small scales translational symmetry is preserved or spontaneously broken. A grainy vacuum would suggest that physics at macroscopic scales is to some (possibly small) degree unpredictable. Hawking <sup>1,2</sup> has suggested that the formation and evaporation of quantum black holes leads to such unpredictability. The question has also been raised as to whether wavefunction collapse in quantum mechanics, an apparent breakdown of determinism, has anything to do with strong non-linear effects in quantum gravity, though no self-consistent picture has been constructed along these lines. More generally, any Lagrangian that has non-renormalizable terms that contain field derivatives of higher order than the usual kinetic term $`_\mu \varphi ^\mu \varphi `$ may imply breaking of translational symmetry.

Probably, any breaking of translational invariance also involves breaking of Lorentz invariance. This is because otherwise there would be energy non-conservation, which, if due to Planck scale effects, would be unacceptably conspicuous. On the other hand, a Lorentz invariant vacuum that contains quantum black holes could contain an infinite density of them because of the infinitude of Lorentz boosts, so, if they were to have any physical effect on objects of arbitrarily high energy, then a high energy regularization procedure would surely be a prerequisite for describing such an effect, and such a procedure might discard Lorentz invariance at sufficiently high energy.

It is pointed out here that observational limits on Rayleigh scattering of spin 1/2 particles rule out a Lorentz non-invariant grainy vacuum. Although the discussion is hampered by the lack of a specific theory of quantum gravity, we make a simple model in which the conclusions are quantitatively robust.

The results of the Einstein-Padolsky-Rosen experiment tell us that nature can coordinate phases even over space-like separations when it is necessary to do so to protect the most basic kinematical conservation laws. But this result would not be obvious without the experimental results. Given the logical possibility that quantum gravity may be more complicated than already existing theories, which could make it ”harder” to coordinate phases, there is a priori motivation for doing other EPR-type experiments. Looking for Rayleigh scattering of extremely high energy quanta that traverse large distances is proposed in this spirit.

## II Spontaneous Breaking of Translational Invariance

It is assumed here that the interaction between a quantum and ”grain” of vacuum preserves unitarity and merely changes the phase of wavefunctions in some 4 + n dimensional space that includes the four external space time dimensions and internal dimensions as well. (Possibly, one could attribute the observed local gauge symmetries in nature to the grains themselves, for any low energy physics that survives their effects must be robust to local changes of phase.) The effects of the grains are assumed to be local to a very good approximation so that, although the wavefront is corrugated by the grains, the angular momentum relative to any particular point is conserved by the interaction with a grain at that same point.

One might suppose that the particular mechanism of Planck scale quantum black holes would be hard to reconcile with Lorentz invariance at all scales. If Lorentz invariance is an exact symmetry of the vacuum, then there are an infinite number of quantum black holes at any point, corresponding to the infinity of velocity space at each spatial coordinate. The ability of QBH’s to swallow an object would not decrease with relative velocity, so their opacities would add up. Moreover, the noise generated by the quantum black holes gives rise to a sort of Olber’s paradox: Any point at any time is subjected to the output of black hole evaporation at all other points within its backward light cone. Hence any regularization procedure that deals with this difficulty might have to include some sort of cosmological assumption, and define a select frame of reference. There is some literature on the possibility that Lorentz invariance is merely a low energy symmetry<sup>4</sup>. There may, however, be some differences between those proposals and what is considered here. In any case, the dimensional argument given below does not make sense if Lorentz invariance is exact at arbitrarily high energies.

In this paper we merely assume that energies and hence wavelengths $`\lambda `$ are defined in comoving cosmological coordinates, and that the sum of the effects of all scattering grains on any point in space time can be roughly represented by a spherical scatterer with a scattering length of order the Planck length.

Consider, then, the scattering of a massless particle by a more or less closely packed ”foam” of individual grains (e.g. quantum black holes) and let us model the grains as something like packed spheres of radius $`l_P10^{33}`$cm. The scattering of a massless particle of spin s requires a finite amplitude for a helicity flip of 2s, but conservation of angular momentum relative to the cell that scatters thus requires a change in orbital angular momentum of 2s. The scattering cross section is thus of order $`l_P^2(l_P/\lambda )^{4s}`$.

Consider photons: s=1. In traversing cosmological distances, a photon traverses of order $`10^{60}l_P`$, so the universe might plausibly become opaque to quanta above $`10^{15}m_P10^{13}`$eV. Curiously, although photons just below this energy have been detected from point sources, there is no firm evidence that any high energy quanta above this energy propagate freely as they are all charged particles that are in any case deflected by cosmic magnetic fields. (But see reference 5.)

Below $`10^{13}`$ eV, although the optical depth to large angle Rayleigh scattering is in any case less than unity, there may still be small angle refractive scattering. Consider first the limit on deviations from Newton’s first law that comes from ultrahigh energy astronomy, which at present can detect TeV gamma rays from distances of order 100 Mpc (Markarian 501) with a variability timescale of order $`10^3`$ seconds.<sup>6</sup> This implies that the angular deflection is less than $`10^{6.5}`$.

If one assumes that the index of refraction of the vacuum is significantly affected by the presence of Planck scale foam, that is, the presence of the foam has a significant effect on the propagation of light relative to the ”bare” vacuum, then fluctuations in the index of refraction over a scale of order wavelength $`\lambda `$ are of order $`(\lambda /l_P)^{3/2}`$. Over one wavelength $`\lambda `$, a photon is ”wing” Rayleigh scattered by an angle of order $`(\lambda /l_P)^{3/2}`$. In traversing a cosmological distance D, the photon is scattered of order $`(D/\lambda )`$ times, yielding a net scattering angle of order $`l_P^{3/2}D^{1/2}/\lambda ^2`$. For Tev photons ($`\lambda 10^{16}`$ cm), this is about $`10^4`$, somewhat in excess of the observed limits.

Now consider spin 1/2 particles. Here the scattering cross section scales as $`l_P^2(l_P/\lambda )^2`$. Identifying neutrinos as massless spin 1/2 particles implies a cosmic mean free path for $`10`$ MeV neutrinos of only $`10^9`$cm. This is difficult to reconcile with solar neutrino data and with the supernova 1987A neutrinos. Similar problems exist for electrons given the survival of high energy storage beams in accelerators.

If the familiar spin 1/2 fermions are in fact spin 3/2 gravitinos in the 4+n dimensional space<sup>7</sup> one must consider that the scattering grains are small compared to the compactified dimensions. In this case, the scattering cross section scales as $`(l_P/\lambda )^6`$ on scales smaller than the compactification scale. Thus, for a compactification scale that is $`\eta ^1l_P`$, the mean free path of the ”familiar spin 1/2 ” particle is increased by $`\eta ^4`$, up to $`10^{17}`$ cm at $`E_\nu =10MeV`$ for $`\eta `$ as low as 1/100. This is still ruled out by SN 1987A.

Note that a Lorentz invariant version of translational symmetry breaking would necessarily imply energy non-conservation and could be tested on essentially every electron, taking the energy of the electron to be its rest mass. The existence of stable atoms over a Hubble time appears to immediately rule out this possibility.

## III Neutrino Mixing

We now consider the possibility that the phases of the grains are coordinated such that linear momentum and energy are conserved as well as charge and angular momentum. In this case, interactions with the grains (e.g. absorption and reemission by quantum black holes) can alter only the non-conserved quantum numbers of a particle such as the generation type of a massless neutrino. This is more or less equivalent to representing the grains as internal lines, but possibly with some loss of phase information in their propagators. If neutrinos are massless (except for the interaction with the grains) they would in the above picture simply be scattered among different generations so that the neutrino flux of any type emitted by a source would eventually approach the average over the 3 generations. This would be similar to oscillations except that the change in neutrino type would be irreversible, and the mass matrix would have a random component with imaginary expected eigenvalues. Applying the simple dimensional arguments discussed above and assuming neutrinos to be spin 1/2 down to the Planck scale, the mean free path for a 30 GeV neutrino would be about 10<sup>2</sup> cm. This is apparently ruled out by post-beam dump experiments at large accelerators, which set a minimum oscillation length of order a km for 30 Gev neutrinos.

If the neutrinos have spin 3/2 in a higher dimensional manifold that has dimensions $`\eta ^1`$ times the Planck length, then the same dimensional arguments raise the neutrino mixing length by $`\eta ^4`$. If $`\eta 10^{3/4}`$, then the mixing length for 30 GeV neutrinos is of order 10<sup>5</sup> cm, probably allowed by present experiments but testable with next generation experiments.

The range of possible values for $`\eta `$ still has enough flexibility that, together with the rough nature of the arguments, accurate quantitative predictions are not attempted here. The predicted level of atmospheric neutrino mixing could be detectable for reasonable values of $`\eta `$, as the accelerator experiments allow an $`E^2`$ mixing length to be less than an Earth diameter for E $``$ 0.5 Gev (and implying in the present context a compactification length scale within an order of magnitude or so of the Planck scale), but an a priori quantitative prediction is not attempted here. We note, however, that if atmospheric neutrinos are produced in the ratio of two muon types, no tau types to one electron type, the post-mixing distribution is equal numbers of each, as if the muon neutrinos had oscillated with tau neutrinos. Differences between the two hypotheses would arise, however, in the ratio of neutrinos to anti-neutrinos, and in the energy dependence of the mixing length.

Finally, the hypothesis of neutrinos mixing over a length that is proportional to $`E^2`$ implies that if atmospheric neutrinos are mixed over a length scale of order 0.1 Earth radius, then solar Boron neutrinos ($`E10`$ MeV) are mixed over a scale of less than 1 astronomical unit, whereas the pp neutrinos ($`E0.26`$ MeV) have a range that exceeds an A.U. Thus, the Boron neutrinos flux at Earth would be reduced by a factor of 3, whereas the pp neutrino flux at Earth would be nearly unchanged. A quantitative fit to the GALLEX, Homestake, and SuperKamiokande data is made in a companion paper.<sup>8</sup>

I am grateful to Y. Avishai, R. Brustein, M. Berry, J. Bekenstein, Y. Band, A. Dar, E. Gedalin, E. Guendelman, S. Nussinov, D. Owen, Z.Seidov and V. Usov for vital discussions. I acknowledge support from the Israel-U.S. BSF.

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