Constraints on temporal variation of fundamental constants from GRBs

Abstract

The formation of a strange or hybrid star from a neutron star progenitor is believed to occur when the central stellar density exceeds a critical value. If the transition from hadron to quark matter is of first order, the event has to release a huge amount of energy in a very short time and we would be able to observe the phenomenon even if it is at cosmological distance far from us; most likely, such violent quark deconfinement would be associated with at least a fraction of the observed gamma ray bursts. If we allow for temporal variations of fundamental constants like ${\Lambda }_{QCD}$ or $G_N$, we can expect that neutron stars with an initial central density just below the critical value can enter into the region where strange or hybrid stars are the true ground state. From the observed rate of long gamma ray bursts, we are able to deduce the constraint ${\dot{G}}_N/G_N\lesssim 10^{-17}\mathrm{y}{\mathrm{r}}^{-1}$, which is about 5 orders of magnitude more stringent than the strongest previous bounds on a possible increasing $G_N$.

5 pages, no figure. v3: refereed version

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Varying constants, Gravitation and Cosmology
• Quark matter nucleation in neutron stars and astrophysical implications
• Quark matter nucleation in hot hadronic matter
• The minimally extended Varying Speed of Light (meVSL)
• Effects of quark matter nucleation on the evolution of proto-neutron stars
• Formation of hybrid stars from metastable hadronic stars
• Chiral model approach to quark matter nucleation in neutron stars
• Quark matter nucleation with a microscopic hadronic equation of state
• Study of shock wave dynamics produced by interaction of a fireball with the surrounding medium to it, to explain the x-ray afterglow of Gamma Ray Burst-GRBs