Nuclear Data in Oklo and Time-Variability of Fundamental Coupling Constants

2002/05/19 by Yasunori Fujii, Fujii, Yasunori, Akira Iwamoto +13
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Nuclear Theory (nucl-th) #hep-ph #nucl-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.hep-ph/0205206

3 pages, 1 figure, presented at Int. Conf. on Nuclear Data for Science and Technology, ND2001, 7-12 October, 2001, Tsukuba, Japan

arxiv created 2002/05/19 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30

Abstract

We re-examined Shlyakhter's analysis of the Sm data in Oklo. With a special care of minimizing contamination due to the inflow of the isotope after the end of the reactor activity, we confirmed that his result on the time-variability of the fine-structure constant, |α/α|\lsim 10^-17\rm y^-1, was basically correct. In addition to this upper bound, however, we obtained another result that indicates a different value of α 2 billion years ago. We add comments on the recent result from QSO's.

Related

• Direct Test of the Time-Independence of Fundamental Nuclear Constants Using the Oklo Natural Reactor
• Bound on the variation in the fine structure constant implied by Oklo data
• Investigation of the fundamental constants stability based on the reactor Oklo burn-up analysis
• The electromagnetic fine-structure constant in primordial nucleosynthesis revisited
• The Oklo Constraints on Alpha-Decay Half-Lives