Spontaneous Lorentz violation via QED with non-exact gauge invariance

We reconsider an alternative theory of QED with the photon as a massless vector Nambu-Goldstone boson and show that the underlying spontaneous Lorentz violation caused by the vector field vacuum expectation value, while being superficial in gauge invariant theory, becomes physically significant in QED with a tiny gauge non-invariance. This leads, through special dispersion relations appearing for charged fermions, to a new class of phenomena, which could be of distinctive observational interest in particle physics and astrophysics. They include a significant change in the GZK cutoff for UHE cosmic-ray nucleons, stability of high-energy pions and W bosons, a modification of nucleon beta decays, and some other ones. (orig.)