Dynamical mass generation in Lorentz-violating QED

Understand

A Lorentz violating modification of massless QED is proposed, with higher order space derivatives for the photon field.

• The fermion dynamical mass generation is studied with the Schwinger-Dyson approach, and it is found that the resulting mass is many orders of magnitude smaller than the (Plank-) mass scale introduced by the higher order derivative terms.
• This is due to a suppressing factor, non-analytic in the fine structure constant and exponentially small.
• This scenario is an alternative to the Higgs mechanism for the electron mass, which arises here from Lorentz violating effects at high energies.