Anthropic constraint on transient variations of fundamental constants

Autor:	Dergachev, Vsevolod D., Tan, Hoang Bao Tran, Varganov, Sergey A., Derevianko, Andrei
Rok vydání:	2022
Předmět:	Physics - Atomic Physics Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology Physics - Chemical Physics Physics - Popular Physics
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
Popis:	The anthropic principle implies that life can emerge and be sustained only in a narrow range of values of fundamental constants. Here we show that anthropic arguments can set powerful constraints on {\em transient} variations of the fine-structure constant $\alpha$ over the past 4 billion years since the appearance of lifeforms on Earth. We argue that the passage through Earth of a macroscopic dark matter clump with a value of $\alpha$ inside differing substantially from its nominal value would make Earth uninhabitable. We demonstrate that in the regime of extreme variation of $\alpha$, the periodic table of elements is truncated, water fails to serve as a universal solvent, and protons become unstable. Thereby, the anthropic principle constrains the likelihood of such encounters on a 4-billion-year timescale. This enables us to improve existing astrophysical bounds on certain dark matter model couplings by several orders of magnitude. Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/2202.04228 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv