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Register a new userNatural Nuclear Reactor Oklo and Variation of Fundamental Constants Part 1: Computation of Neutronics of Fresh Core
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Using modern methods of reactor physics we have performed full-scale calculations of the natural reactor Oklo. For reliability we have used recent version of two Monte Carlo codes: Russian code MCU REA and world wide known code MCNP (USA). Both codes produce similar results. We have constructed a computer model of the reactor Oklo zone RZ2 which takes into account all details of design and composition. The calculations were performed for three fresh cores with different uranium contents. Multiplication factors, reactivities and neutron fluxes were calculated. We have estimated also the temperature and void effects for the fresh core. As would be expected, we have found for the fresh core a significant difference between reactor and Maxwell spectra, which was used before for averaging cross sections in the Oklo reactor. The averaged cross section of Sm-149 and its dependence on the shift of resonance position (due to variation of fundamental constants) are significantly different from previous results. Contrary to results of some previous papers we find no evidence for the change of the fine structure constant in the past and obtain new, most accurate limits on its variation with time: -4 10^{-17}year^{-1} < d alpha/dt/alpha < 3 10^{-17} year^{-1} A further improvement in the accuracy of the limits can be achieved by taking account of the core burnup. These calculations are in progress.
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We investigate the effect of a variation of fundamental constants on primordial element production in Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). We focus on the effect of a possible change in the nucleon-nucleon interaction on nuclear reaction rates involving the A=5 (5Li and 5He) and A=8 (8Be) unstable nuclei. The reaction rates for 3He(d,p)4He and 3H(d,n)4He are dominated by the properties of broad analog resonances in 5Li and 5He compound nuclei respectively. While the triple-alpha process 4He(aa,g)12C is normally not effective in BBN, its rate is very sensitive to the position of the Hoyle state and could in principle be drastically affected if 8Be were stable during BBN. We found that the effect of the variation of constants on the 3He(d,p)4He, 3H(d,n)4He nd 4He(aa,g)12C reaction rates is not sufficient to induce a significant effect on BBN, even with a stable 8Be. The main influences come from the weak rates and the A=2, n(p,g)d, bottleneck reaction.
The formation of a strange or hybrid star from a neutron star progenitor is believed to occur when the central stellar density exceeds a critical value. If the transition from hadron to quark matter is of first order, the event has to release a huge amount of energy in a very short time and we would be able to observe the phenomenon even if it is at cosmological distance far from us; most likely, such violent quark deconfinement would be associated with at least a fraction of the observed gamma ray bursts. If we allow for temporal variations of fundamental constants like $Lambda_{QCD}$ or $G_N$, we can expect that neutron stars with an initial central density just below the critical value can enter into the region where strange or hybrid stars are the true ground state. From the observed rate of long gamma ray bursts, we are able to deduce the constraint $dot{G}_N/G_N lesssim 10^{-17} {rm yr^{-1}}$, which is about 5 orders of magnitude more stringent than the strongest previous bounds on a possible increasing $G_N$.
We compute the time variation of the fundamental constants (such as the ratio of the proton mass to the electron mass, the strong coupling constant, the fine structure constant and Newtons constant) within the context of the so-called running vacuum models (RVMs) of the cosmic evolution. Recently, compelling evidence has been provided showing that these models are able to fit the main cosmological data (SNIa+BAO+H(z)+LSS+BBN+CMB) significantly better than the concordance $Lambda$CDM model. Specifically, the vacuum parameters of the RVM (i.e. those responsible for the dynamics of the vacuum energy) prove to be nonzero at a confidence level $gtrsim3sigma$. Here we use such remarkable status of the RVMs to make definite predictions on the cosmic time variation of the fundamental constants. It turns out that the predicted variations are close to the present observational limits. Furthermore, we find that the time variation of the dark matter particles should be crucially involved in the total mass variation of our Universe. A positive measurement of this kind of effects could be interpreted as strong support to the micro and macro connection (viz. the dynamical feedback between the evolution of the cosmological parameters and the time variation of the fundamental constants of the microscopic world), previously proposed by two of us (HF and JS).
Any variation of the fundamental physical constants, and more particularly of the fine structure constant, $alpha$, or of the mass of the electron, $m_e$, would affect the recombination history of the Universe and cause an imprint on the cosmic microwave background angular power spectra. We show that the Planck data allow one to improve the constraint on the time variation of the fine structure constant at redshift $zsim 10^3$ by about a factor of 5 compared to WMAP data, as well as to break the degeneracy with the Hubble constant, $H_0$. In addition to $alpha$, we can set a constraint on the variation of the mass of the electron, $m_{rm e}$, and on the simultaneous variation of the two constants. We examine in detail the degeneracies between fundamental constants and the cosmological parameters, in order to compare the limits obtained from Planck and WMAP and to determine the constraining power gained by including other cosmological probes. We conclude that independent time variations of the fine structure constant and of the mass of the electron are constrained by Planck to ${Deltaalpha}/{alpha}= (3.6pm 3.7)times10^{-3}$ and ${Delta m_{rm e}}/{m_{rm e}}= (4 pm 11)times10^{-3}$ at the 68% confidence level. We also investigate the possibility of a spatial variation of the fine structure constant. The relative amplitude of a dipolar spatial variation of $alpha$ (corresponding to a gradient across our Hubble volume) is constrained to be $deltaalpha/alpha=(-2.4pm 3.7)times 10^{-2}$.
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