Noncommutativity and Lorentz violation in relativistic heavy ion collisions

We show that relativistic heavy ion collisions at LHC energies could be used as an experimental probe to detect fundamental properties of spacetime long speculated about. Our results rely on the recent proposal that magnetic fields of intensity much larger than that of magnetars should be produced at the beginning of the collisions and this could have an important impact on the experimental manifestation of a noncommutative spacetime. Indeed, in the noncommutative generalization of electrodynamics the interplay between a nonzero noncommutative parameter and an external magnetic field leads us to predict the production of lepton pairs of low invariant mass by free photons (an event forbidden by Lorentz invariant electrodynamics) in relativistic heavy ion collisions at present and future available energies. This unique channel can be clearly considered as a signature of noncommutativity. On the other hand, the search for such decays is worth anyway because their absence would ameliorate of three orders of magnitude the current bound on the noncommutative parameter. (orig.)