Doubly-special Relativity: First Results and Key Open Problems

Over the last two years there has been a significant research effort aimed at the development of “Doubly-Special-Relativity” (or “DSR”) theories , with contributions from about a dozen research groups . These theories of the relativistic transformations between inertial observers involve both an observer-independent large-velocity scale and an observer-independent small-length/large-momentum scale. Some of the DSR results can already be seen as robust, and provide encouragement for the idea that DSR might plausibly have a role in quantum-gravity/quantumspacetime research, which was my main motivation 1 in proposing the DSR research programme. As we start to establish some characteristic features of the DSR framework, we also start realizing that there are a few recurring themes of DSR research, issues that several authors have attempted to address, but still await a satisfactory analysis. Here I intend to review the key results obtained so far in exploring the DSR framework, and I intend to discuss the key open issues for this research line. I will also present some preliminary ideas which might be useful in research concerning these open issues.