Spontaneous breaking of Lorentz symmetry with an antisymmetric tensor

This paper considers the spontaneous violation of Lorentz symmetry by the vacuum condensation of an antisymmetric two-tensor. The coset construction for nonlinear realization of spacetime symmetries is employed to build the most general low-energy effective action for the Goldstone modes interacting with photons. We analyze the model within the context of the Standard-Model extension and noncommutative QED. Experimental bounds for some parameters of the model are discussed, and we readdress the subtle issues of stability and causality in Lorentz-noninvariant scenarios. To set a sensible low-energy effective model, in addition to the two photon polarizations only one Goldstone mode must be dynamical, and the enhancement of the stability by accounting for interaction terms points to a protection against observational Lorentz violation.