English

Probing the time variation of fine structure constant using galaxy clusters and quintessence model

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2021-11-24 v1

Abstract

We explore a possible time variation of the fine structure constant (αe2/c\alpha \equiv e^2/\hbar c) using the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect measurements of galaxy clusters along with their X-ray observations. Specifically, the ratio of the integrated Compto-ionization parameter YSZDA2Y_{SZ}D_A^2 and its X-ray counterpart YXY_X is used as an observable to constrain the bounds on the variation of α\alpha. Considering the violation of cosmic distance duality relation, this ratio depends on the fine structure constant as α3\sim \alpha^3. We use the quintessence model to provide the origin of α\alpha time variation. In order to give a robust test on α\alpha variation, two galaxy cluster samples, the 61 clusters provided by the Planck collaboration and the 58 clusters detected by the South Pole Telescope, are collected for analysis. Their X-ray observations are given by the XMM-Newton survey. Our results give ζ=0.2030.099+0.101\zeta=-0.203^{+0.101}_{-0.099} for the Planck sample and ζ=0.0430.148+0.165\zeta=-0.043^{+0.165}_{-0.148} for the SPT sample, indicating that α\alpha is constant with redshift within 3σ3\sigma and 1σ1\sigma for the two samples, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.00134,
  title  = {Probing the time variation of fine structure constant using galaxy clusters and quintessence model},
  author = {Zhi-E Liu and Wen-Fei Liu and Tong-Jie Zhang and Zhong-Xu Zhai and Kamal Bora},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.00134},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

13 pages, 5 figures. Accepted by ApJ