Optical-Cavity Limits on Higher-Order Lorentz Violation

Understand

An optical ring cavity is used to place the first laboratory constraints on parity-odd nonrenormalizable Lorentz violation.

• Variations in resonant frequencies are limited to parts in $10^{15}$.
• Absolute sensitivity to Lorentz-violating operators of mass dimension 6 is improved by a factor of a million over existing parity-even microwave-cavity bounds.
• Sensitivity to dimension-8 violations is improved by fourteen orders of magnitude.