Possible Evidence for Lorentz Invariance Violation in Gamma-Ray Burst 221009A

The preliminary detections of the gamma-ray burst 221009A up to 18 TeV by LHAASO and up to 251 TeV by Carpet 2 have been reported through Astronomer’s Telegrams and Gamma-ray Coordination Network circulars. Since this burst is at redshift z = 0.1505, these photons may at first seem to have a low probability to avoid pair production off of background radiation fields and survive to reach detectors on Earth. By extrapolating the reported 0.1-1.0 GeV Fermi Large Area Telescope spectrum from this burst to higher energies and using this to limit the intrinsic spectrum of the burst, we show that the survival of the 18 TeV photon detected by LHAASO is not unlikely with many recent extragalactic background light models, although the detection of a 251 TeV event is still very unlikely. This can be resolved if Lorentz invariance is violated at an energy scale E _QG ≲ 49E _Planck in the linear (n = 1) case, and E _QG ≲ 10⁻⁶ E _Planck in the quadratic (n = 2) case (95% confidence limits), where E _Planck is the Planck energy. This could potentially be the first evidence for subluminal Lorentz invariance violation.