Abstract. One of the predictions of quantum gravity phenomenology is that, in situations where Planck-scale physics and the notion of a quantum spacetime are relevant, field propagation will be described by a modified set of laws. Descriptions of the underlying mechanism differ from model to model, but a general feature is that electromagnetic waves will have non-trivial dispersion relations. A physical phenomenon that offers the possibility of experimentally testing these ideas in the foreseeable future is the propagation of high-energy gamma rays from GRBs at cosmological distances. With the observation of non-standard dispersion relations within experimental reach, it is thus important to find out whether there are competing effects that could either mask or be mistaken for this one. In this letter, we consider possible effects from standard physics, due to electromagnetic interactions, classical as well as quantum, and coupling to classical geometry. Our results indicate that, for currently observed gamma-ray energies and estimates of cosmological parameter values, those effects are much smaller than the quantum gravity one if the latter is first order in the energy; some corrections are comparable in magnitude to the second-order quantum gravity ones, but they have a very different energy dependence.

PACS numbers: 04.40.Nr, 11.80.La, 95.85.Pw

Print publication: Issue 12 (21 June 2004)
Received 26 April 2004
Published 18 May 2004