Abnormal threshold behaviors of photo-pion production off the proton in the GZK region

Abstract

Abstract The cosmic-ray spectrum structures help to study the acceleration and propagation mechanism of ultra-high energy cosmic rays, and these structures were predicted to culminate in a cut-off, named the Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin (GZK) cut-off, near $$5\times 10^{19}~\textrm{eV}$$ 5 × 10 19 eV as a result of the inelastic interaction of protons with the $$2.73~\textrm{K}$$ 2.73 K black body radiation. The confirmation of the existence of GZK cut-off was tortuous, leading to activities to explore new physics, such as the cosmic-ray new components, unidentified cosmic-ray origins, unknown propagation mechanism and the modification of fundamental physics concepts like the tiny Lorentz invariance violation (LV). The confirmation of the GZK cut-off provides an opportunity to constrain the LV effect. We use a phenomenological framework to restudy the GZK mechanism under the Planck scale deformation of the proton and pion dispersion relations. Restudying the photon induced pion production of the proton $$\textrm{p}+\gamma \rightarrow \textrm{p}+\pi ^0$$ p + γ → p + π 0 , we predict abnormal threshold behaviors of this reaction under different LV modifications. Therefore we can study the LV effects not only from the conventional GZK cut-off, but also from potentially threshold anomalies of the pion production process. We divide the LV parameter space into three regions, and analyze the constraints from current observations in each region. The current observations have set strict restrictions on a certain LV region. However, for others LV regions, further experimental observations and theoretical researches are still needed, and we also find survival space for some theoretical explorations that permit specific LV effects.