Studying Lorentz-violating electromagnetic waves in confined media

Full text. Planck energy scale is still far beyond current possibilities. A question of interest is whether the Lorentz symmetry remains valid at these extremely high energies, whose answer certainly would be useful whenever building grand unified theories, in which general relativity is consistently accommodated. Here, we study a reminiscent of this possible symmetry violation, incorporated in the body of the so-called Standard Model Extension (SME). More precisely, we deal with the pure (Abelian) gauge sector, so that we have a modified classical electromagnetism in (3+1) dimensions, whose Lagrangian include a term proportional to a (constant) background tensor that breaks the Lorentz symmetry, but respecting CPT. Our attention is devoted to the wave-like solutions constrained to propagate inside confined media, like waveguides and resonant cavities. Our preliminary findings indicate that Lorentz-breaking implies in modifications of the standard results which are proportional to the (very small) violating parameters, but could be largely enhanced by diminishing the size of the confined media. Under study is the case of a toroidal cavity where the electromagnetic field should respect the additional requirement of being single-valued in the (toroidal) angular variable. Perhaps, such an extra feature combined with the usual boundary conditions could lead us to large effects of this violation, somewhat similar to those predicted for CPT- and Lorentz-odd electromagnetic waves constrained to propagate along a hollow conductor waveguide. (author)