Constraining a possible time variation of the gravitational constant G with terrestrial nuclear laboratory data

Abstract

Testing the constancy of the gravitational constant G has been a longstanding fundamental question in natural science. As first suggested by Jofré, Reisenegger and Fernández [1], Dirac's hypothesis of a decreasing gravitational constant $G$ with time due to the expansion of the Universe would induce changes in the composition of neutron stars, causing dissipation and internal heating. Eventually, neutron stars reach their quasi-stationary states where cooling due to neutrino and photon emissions balances the internal heating. The correlation of surface temperatures and radii of some old neutron stars may thus carry useful information about the changing rate of G. Using the density dependence of the nuclear symmetry energy constrained by recent terrestrial laboratory data on isospin diffusion in heavy-ion reactions at intermediate energies and the size of neutron skin in ${}^{208}Pb$ within the gravitochemical heating formalism, we obtain an upper limit of the relative changing rate of $|\dot{G}/G|\le 4\times 10^{-12}y{r}^{-1}$ consistent with the best available estimates in the literature.

27 pages, 11 figures, and 2 tables. Accepted version to appear in PRC (2007)

References in corpus (5)

• Neutron-Rich Nuclei in Heaven and Earth
• Evidence for 1122 Hz X-Ray Burst Oscillations from the Neutron-Star X-Ray Transient XTE J1739-285
• Isospin Diffusion in Heavy-Ion Collisions and the Neutron Skin Thickness of Lead
• Constraining a possible time-variation of the gravitational constant through "gravitochemical heating" of neutron stars
• Internal heating and thermal emission from old neutron stars: Constraints on dense-matter and gravitational physics

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Distinguishing Modified Gravity from Dark Energy
• Neutron skin thickness in droplet model with surface width dependence: indications of softness of the nuclear symmetry energy
• Nuclear matter symmetry energy and the symmetry energy coefficient in the mass formula
• Constraining properties of rapidly rotating neutron stars using data from heavy-ion collisions
• Effective Interactions In Neutron-Rich Matter