Incompatibility of fine-structure constant variations at recombination with local observations

Abstract

Some attempts of easing the critical Hubble tension present in modern cosmology have resorted to using variations of fundamental constants, such as the fine-structure constant, at the time of recombination. In this article we demonstrate that there are critical hurdles to construct such viable models using scalar fields, due to the striking precision of local constraints on the fine-structure constant stability. These hurdles demonstrate that in single-field models one has to extremely fine-tune the shape of the potential and/or the initial conditions. Indeed, for single field models in a potential that is not fine-tuned we can put a generic bound at recombination of $\Delta \alpha /\alpha <5\cdot 10^{-4}$ (95\% CL).

Published in Physical review D

References in corpus (11)

• Cosmic Distances Calibrated to 1% Precision with Gaia EDR3 Parallaxes and Hubble Space Telescope Photometry of 75 Milky Way Cepheids Confirm Tension with LambdaCDM
• Environmental Dependence of Masses and Coupling Constants
• New Extraction of the Cosmic Birefringence from the Planck 2018 Polarization Data
• The status of varying constants: a review of the physics, searches and implications
• Subaru Telescope limits on cosmological variations in the fine-structure constant
• Fundamental physics with ESPRESSO: Precise limit on variations in the fine-structure constant towards the bright quasar HE 0515$-$4414
• Primordial nucleosynthesis with varying fundamental constants: Improved constraints and a possible solution to the Lithium problem
• Evolution of the fine-structure constant in runaway dilaton models
• Constraining Variations in the Fine Structure Constant in the presence of Early Dark Energy
• Varying fundamental constants principal component analysis: additional hints about the Hubble tension
• Varying fine-structure constant cosmography

Cited by in corpus (3)

• The CosmoVerse White Paper: Addressing observational tensions in cosmology with systematics and fundamental physics
• Non-parametric reconstruction of the fine structure constant with galaxy clusters
• A speed limit on tachyon fields from cosmological and fine-structure data