No Arabic abstract
Variation of the speed of light is quite a debated issue in cosmology with some benefits, but also with some controversial concerns. Many approaches to develop a consistent varying speed of light (VSL) theory have been developed recently. Although a lot of theoretical debate has sprout out about their feasibility and reliability, the most obvious and straightforward way to discriminate and check if such theories are really workable has been missed out or not fully employed. What is meant here is the comparison of these theories with observational data in a fully comprehensive way. In this paper we try to address this point i.e., by using the most updated cosmological probes, we test three different candidates for a VSL theory (Barrow & Magueijo, Avelino & Martins, and Moffat) signal. We consider many different ans{a}tze for both the functional form of $c(z)$ (which cannot be fixed by theoretical motivations) and for the dark energy dynamics, in order to have a clear global picture from which we extract the results. We compare these results using a reliable statistical tool such as the Bayesian Evidence. We find that the present cosmological data is perfectly compatible with any of these VSL scenarios, but in one case (Moffat model) we have a higher Bayesian Evidence ratio in favour of VSL than in the standard $c=$ constant $Lambda$CDM scenario. Moreover, in such a scenario, the VSL signal can help to strengthen constraints on the spatial curvature (with indication toward an open universe), to clarify some properties of dark energy (exclusion of a cosmological constant at $2sigma$ level) and is also falsifiable in the nearest future due to some peculiar issues which differentiate this model from the standard model. Finally, we have applied some priors which come from cosmology and, in particular, from information theory and gravitational thermodynamics.
We derive a luminosity distance formula for the varying speed of light (VSL) theory which involves higher order characteristics of expansion such as jerk, snap and lerk which can test the impact of varying $c$ onto the evolution of the universe. We show that the effect of varying $c$ is possible to be isolated due to the relations connecting observational parameters already by measuring the second-order term in redshift $z$ unless there is a redundancy between the curvature and an exotic fluid of cosmic strings scaling the same way as the curvature.
It has been recently claimed that cosmologies with time dependent speed of light might solve some of the problems of the standard cosmological scenario, as well as inflationary scenarios. In this letter we show that most of these models, when analyzed in a consistent way, lead to large violations of charge conservation. Thus, they are severly constrained by experiment, including those where $c$ is a power of the scale factor and those whose source term is the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. In addition, early Universe scenarios with a sudden change of $c$ related to baryogenesis are discarded.
The varying speed of light (VSL) theory is controversial. It succeeds in explaining some cosmological problems, but on the other hand it is excluded by mainstream physics because it will shake the foundation of physics. In the present paper, we devote ourselves to test whether the speed of light is varying from the observational data of the type Ia Supernova, Baryon Acoustic Oscillation, Observational $H(z)$ data and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We select the common form $c(t)=c_0a^n(t)$ with the contribution of dark energy and matter, where $c_0$ is the current value of speed of light, $n$ is a constant, and consequently construct a varying speed of light dark energy model (VSLDE). The combined observational data show a much trivial constraint $n=-0.0033 pm 0.0045$ at 68.3% confidence level, which indicates that the speed of light may be a constant with high significance. By reconstructing the time-variable $c(t)$, we find that the speed of light almost has no variation for redshift $z < 10^{-1}$. For high-$z$ observations, they are more sensitive to the VSLDE model, but the variation of speed of light is only in order of $10^{-2}$. We also introduce the geometrical diagnostic $Om (z)$ to show the difference between the VSLDE and $Lambda$CDM model. The result shows that the current data are difficult to differentiate them. All the results show that the observational data favor the constant speed of light.
In this work, we investigate Newtonian cosmologies with a time-varying gravitational constant, $G(t)$. We examine whether such models can reproduce the low-redshift cosmological observations without a cosmological constant, or any other sort of explicit dark energy fluid. Starting with a modified Newtons second law, where $G$ is taken as a function of time, we derive the first Friedmann--Lema{^i}tre equation, where a second parameter, $G^*$, appears as the gravitational constant. This parameter is related to the original $G$ from the second law, which remains in the acceleration equation. We use this approach to reproduce various cosmological scenarios that are studied in the literature, and we test these models with low-redshift probes: type-Ia supernovae (SNIa), baryon acoustic oscillations, and cosmic chronometers, taking also into account a possible change in the supernovae intrinsic luminosity with redshift. As a result, we obtain several models with similar $chi^2$ values as the standard $Lambda$CDM cosmology. When we allow for a redshift-dependence of the SNIa intrinsic luminosity, a model with a $G$ exponentially decreasing to zero while remaining positive (model 4) can explain the observations without acceleration. When we assume no redshift-dependence of SNIa, the observations favour a negative $G$ at large scales, while $G^*$ remains positive for most of these models. We conclude that these models offer interesting interpretations to the low-redshift cosmological observations, without needing a dark energy term.
In this paper we extend a new method to measure possible variation of the speed of light by using Baryon Acoustic Oscillations and the Hubble function presented in our earlier paper [V. Salzano, M. P. Dc{a}browski, and R. Lazkoz, Phys. Rev. D93, 063521 (2016)] onto an inhomogeneous model of the universe. The method relies on the fact that there is a simple relation between the angular diameter distance $(D_{A})$ maximum and the Hubble function $(H)$ evaluated at the same maximum-condition redshift, which includes speed of light $c$. One limit of such method was the assumption of null spatial curvature (even if we showed that even a non-zero curvature would have negligible effects). Here, we move one step further: we explicitly assume a model with intrinsic non-null curvature, and calculate the exact relation between $D_{A}$ and $H$ in this case. Then, we evaluate if current or future missions such as SKA can be sensitive enough to detect any such kind of spatial variation of $c$ which can perhaps be related to the recently observed spatial variation of the fine structure constant (an effect known as $alpha$-dipole).