2024/04/26 by Jing-Yu Ran, Bao Wang, Ran, Jing-Yu +3 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Computational Physics and Python Applications #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena (astro-ph.HE) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Statistical and numerical algorithms
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2404.17154
openalex publication_date 2024/04/26 · openalex created_date 2024/04/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A hypothetical photon mass, mγ, can produce a frequency-dependent vacuum dispersion of light, which leads to an additional time delay between photons with different frequencies when they propagate through a fixed distance. The dispersion measure--redshift measurements of fast radio bursts (FRBs) have been widely used to constrain the rest mass of the photon. However, all current studies analyzed the effect of the frequency-dependent dispersion for massive photons in the standard ΛCDM cosmological context. In order to alleviate the circularity problem induced by the presumption of a specific cosmological model based on the fundamental postulate of the masslessness of photons, here we employ a new model-independent smoothing technique, Artificial Neural Network (ANN), to reconstruct the Hubble parameter H(z) function from 34 cosmic-chronometer measurements. By combining observations of 32 well-localized FRBs and the H(z) function reconstructed by ANN, we obtain an upper limit of mγ ≤ 3.5 × 10-51 \rmkg, or equivalently mγ ≤ 2.0 × 10-15 \rmeV/c2 (mγ ≤ 6.5 × 10-51 \rmkg, or equivalently mγ ≤ 3.6 × 10-15 \rmeV/c2) at the 1σ (2σ) confidence level. This is the first cosmology-independent photon mass limit derived from extragalactic sources.