New effects in the interaction between electromagnetic sources mediated by nonminimal Lorentz violating interactions

This paper is dedicated to the study of interactions between external sources for the electromagnetic field in the presence of Lorentz symmetry breaking. We focus on a higher derivative, Lorentz violating interaction that arises from a specific model that was argued to lead to interesting effects in the low energy phenomenology of light pseudoscalars interacting with photons. The kind of higher derivative Lorentz violating interaction we discuss are called nonminimal. They are usually expected to be relevant only at very high energies, but we argue they might also induce relevant effects in low energy phenomena. Indeed, we show that the Lorentz violating background considered by us leads to several phenomena that have no counterpart in Maxwell theory, such as nontrivial torques on isolated electric dipoles, as well as nontrivial forces and torques between line currents and point like charges, as well as among Dirac strings and other electromagnetic sources. (orig.)