Implications of gauge unification for time variation of the fine structure constant

By P. Langacker, G. Segré, M. Strassler. 2001

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Unification of the gauge couplings would imply that time variations of the fine structure constant are accompanied by calculable and very significant time variations in the QCD scale parameter Λ QCD . Since Λ QCD is the dominant factor in setting the hadron masses, estimates made by simple variations of the fine structure constant may not provide meaningful limits. There may also be related variations in Yukawa couplings and the electroweak scale. Implications for the 21 cm hyperfine transition, big bang nucleosynthesis, and the triple alpha process are discussed. We find that the first of these already provides strong constraints on the underlying theory. It is emphasized more generally that time (and space) variations of fundamental couplings and their correlations may be a significant probe of ultra-high-energy physics.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67f82cf495748d7393903a5ce74e6647a0125742

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Citations in the corpus

Probing String Theory with Modulated Cosmological Fluctuations (2003, background): “Notice, however, that it is possible to have variations of the α-s decoupled from each other [9].”
Varying Constants, Gravitation and Cosmology (2010, background): “[77, 74, 75, 135, 136, 185, 313] where the variation of the 3 coupling constants was reduced to the one of αU and MU/MP.”
Cold atom clocks and applications (2005, background): “As pointed out in [25, 45, 46], the hypothetical unification of all interactions implies that a variation of the fine-structure constant α should be accompanied by a variation of the strong interaction constant and of elementary particle masses.”
Further evidence for a variable fine-structure constant from Keck/HIRES QSO absorption spectra (2003, background): “Langacker et al. (2002) emphasize that the observations should be used to constrain the theory and notvice versa.”