Doubly-Special Relativity: Facts, Myths and Some Key Open Issues

Abstract: I report, emphasizing some key open issues and some aspects that are particularly relevant for phenomenology, on the status of the development of “doubly-special” relativistic (“DSR”) theories with both an observer-independent high-velocity scale and an observer-independent small-length/large-momentum scale, possibly relevant for the Planck-scale/quantum-gravity realm. I also give a true/false characterization of the structure of these theories. In particular, I discuss a DSR scenario without modification of the energy-momentum dispersion relation and without the қ-Poincaré Hopf algebra, a scenario with deformed Poincaré symmetries which is not a DSR scenario, some scenarios with both an invariant length scale and an invariant velocity scale which are not DSR scenarios, and a DSR scenario in which it is easy to verify that some observable relativistic (but non-special-relativistic) features are insensitive to possible nonlinear redefinitions of symmetry generators.