2013/10/08 by Marvin F. Silva, Hans A. Winther, David F. Mota +1
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Coupling constant #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Dipole #Fine-structure constant #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Geometry #Halo #Particle physics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Redshift #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar field #Spectral density #Statistics #Symmetry breaking #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.89.024025
published as Phys. Rev. D 89, 024025 (2014) · 11 pages, 9 figures
arxiv created 2013/10/08 · openalex publication_date 2014/01/21 · arxiv updated 2014/01/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We investigate the variation of the fine-structure constant, \ensuremathα, in symmetron models using N-body simulations in which the full spatial distribution of \ensuremathα at different redshifts has been calculated. In particular, we obtain simulated sky maps for this variation, and determine its power spectrum. We find that in high-density regions of space (such as deep inside dark matter halos) the value of \ensuremathα approaches the value measured on Earth. In the low-density outskirts of halos the scalar field value can approach the symmetry breaking value and leads to significantly different values of \ensuremathα. If the scalar-photon coupling strength \ensuremathβ_\ensuremathγ is of order unity we find that the variation of \ensuremathα inside dark matter halos can be of the same magnitude as the recent claims by Webb et al. of a dipole variation. Importantly, our results also show that with low-redshift symmetry breaking these models exhibit some dependence of \ensuremathα on lookback time (as opposed to a pure spatial dipole) which could in principle be detected by sufficiently accurate spectroscopic measurements, such as those of ALMA and the ELT-HIRES.