New bounds on isotropic Lorentz violation

Violations of Lorentz invariance that appear via operators of dimension four or less are completely parametrized in the Standard Model Extension (SME). In the pure photonic sector of the SME, there are 19 dimensionless, Lorentz-violating parameters. Eighteen of these have experimental upper bounds ranging between 10(-11) and 10(-32); the remaining parameter, k(tr), is isotropic and has a much weaker bound of order 10(-4). In this Brief Report, we point out that k(tr) gives a significant contribution to the anomalous magnetic moment of the electron and find a new upper bound of order 10(-8). With reasonable assumptions, we further show that this bound may be improved to 10(-14) by considering the renormalization of other Lorentz-violating parameters that are more tightly constrained. Using similar renormalization arguments, we also estimate bounds on Lorentz-violating parameters in the pure gluonic sector of QCD.