Constraining spacetime variations of nuclear decay rates from light curves of type Ia supernovae

2015/01/31 by Ivan Karpikov, I. S. Karpikov, Maxim Piskunov +4 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Light curve #Luminosity #Nuclear physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Radioactive decay #Redshift #Supernova #Type (biology) #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.91.127301

published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 91(12) (American Physical Society) · 11 pages, 2 figures. V2: larger data set used, constraints improved significantly; text revised considerably

arxiv created 2015/05/12 · openalex publication_date 2015/06/03 · arxiv updated 2015/06/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

The luminosity of fading type Ia supernovae is governed by radioactive decays of ⁵⁶Ni and ⁵⁶Co. The decay rates are proportional to the Fermi coupling constant G_F and, therefore, are determined by the vacuum expectation value v of the Brout-Englert-Higgs field. We use publicly available sets of light curves of type Ia supernova at various redshifts to constrain possible spacetime variations of the ⁵⁶Ni decay rate. The resulting constraint is not very tight; however, it is the only direct bound on the variation of the decay rate for redshifts up to z\ensuremath∼1. We discuss potential applications of the result to searches for nonconstancy of G_F and v.

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