Gauge coupling variation in brane models

Abstract

We consider the space-time variation of gauge couplings in brane-world models induced by the coupling to a bulk scalar field. A variation is generated by the running of the gauge couplings with energy and a conformal anomaly while going from the Jordan to the Einstein frame. We indicate that the one-loop corrections cancel implying that one obtains a variation of the fine structure constant by either directly coupling the gauge fields to the bulk scalar field or having bulk scalar field dependent Yukawa couplings. Taking into account the cosmological dynamics of the bulk scalar field, we constrain the strength of the gauge coupling dependence on the bulk scalar field and relate it to modifications of gravity at low energy.

New cosmological constraints on the variation of fundamental constants: the fine structure constant and the Higgs vacuum expectation value

“…The attempt to unify all fundamental interactions resulted in the development of several theories such as string-derived field theories (Damour & Polyakov 1994;Wu & Wang 1986;Maeda 1988; Barr & Mohapatra 1988;Damour et al 2002a,b), related brane-world theories (Youm 2001a,b;Palma et al 2003;Brax et al 2003) and Kaluza-Klein theories (Gleiser & Taylor 1985;Overduin & Wesson 1997;Kaluza 1921;Klein 1926;Weinberg 1983). These multidimensional theories allow fundamental constants to vary over cosmological timescales.…”

Time variation of the fine structure constant and of the Higgs vacuum expectation value on cosmological time scales

“…Several theories that attempt to unify the four fundamental interactions, such as superstrings (Wu & Wang 1986;Barr & Mohapatra 1988;Maeda 1988;Damour & Polyakov 1994;Damour et al 2002a,b), brane world (Youm 2001a,b;Brax et al 2003;Palma et al 2003) and Kaluza-Klein theories (Kaluza 1921;Klein 1926;Weinberg 1983;Gleiser & Taylor 1985;Overduin & Wesson 1997), allow fundamental constants to vary within cosmological time scales. The time variation of several fundamental constants was studied by Campbell & Olive (1995), Bergström et al (1999), Ichikawa & Kawasaki (2002), Nollett & Lopez (2002), Yoo & Scherrer (2003), Müller et al (2004), Ichikawa & Kawasaki (2004), Cyburt et al (2005), Landau et al (2006), Coc et al (2007), Chamoun et al (2007), Mosquera et al (2008), Landau et al (2008), Landau & Scóccola (2010), , Civitarese et al (2010), among others.…”

Space–time variation of the electron-to-proton mass ratio in a Weyl model

“…There have been several proposals along those lines with various different motivations. Some of them arise from proposals for basic theories that arise in the search for unification of the four fundamental laws of physics such as string-derived field theories [58,33,3,19,20,21], related brane-world theories [59,60,43,12] and Kaluza-Klein theories [27,30,56,25,42]. There are also phenomenological models where a scalar field φ couples to the Maxwell tensor F µν and are characterized by Lagrangian density terms such as −B F (φ)F µν F µν /4 [7,6,39,57,22] and/or to the matter fields Ψ i (i labeling the field flavor) as [39,28,13,5,40,57,22].…”