Where are the Walls?

Abstract

The reported spatial variation in the fine-structure constant at high redshift, if physical, could be due to the presence of dilatonic domains, and one or more domain walls inside our horizon. An absorption spectrum of an object in a different domain from our own would be characterized by a different value of alpha. We show that while a single wall solution is statically comparable to a dipole fit, and is a big improvement over a weighted mean (despite adding 3 parameters), a two-wall solution is a far better fit (despite adding 3 parameters over the single wall solution). We derive a simple model accounting for the two-domain wall solution. The goodness of these fits is however dependent on the extra random error which was argued to account for the large scatter in most of the data. When this error is omitted, all the above solutions are poor fits to the data. When included, the solutions that exhibit a spatial dependence agree with the data much more significantly than the Standard Model; however, the Standard Model itself is not a terrible fit to the data, having a p-value of ~ 20 %.

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Cited by in corpus (13)

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• Planck intermediate results. XXIV. Constraints on variation of fundamental constants
• Exact Solutions to Non-Linear Symmetron Theory: One and Two Mirror Systems
• Exact Solutions to Non-Linear Symmetron Theory II: One and Two Mirror Systems
• Observational Constraints on Varying-alpha Domain Walls
• Reappraisal of the limit on the variation in $\alpha$ implied by Oklo
• Nonlinear multidimensional gravity and the Australian dipole
• Stabilizing the Semilocal String with a Dilatonic Coupling
• Assessing the viability of successful reconstruction of the dynamics of dark energy using varying fundamental couplings
• Dilatonic Topological Defects in 3+1 Dimensions and their Embeddings