Running vacuum in the Universe and the time variation of the fundamental constants of Nature

TL;DR

This paper investigates how running vacuum models of cosmic evolution predict the time variation of fundamental constants, showing these variations are near current observational limits and linking dark matter dynamics to fundamental physics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed predictions of fundamental constant variations within running vacuum models, connecting cosmological data with microscopic physics.

Findings

Predicted variations of fundamental constants are close to current observational limits.

Vacuum parameters are statistically significant and nonzero at over 3 sigma.

Dark matter particle variations are crucial to the Universe's total mass evolution.

Abstract

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 Newton's constant) within the context of the so-called running vacuum models (RVM's) 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 $\gtrsim3\sigma$. Here we use such remarkable status of the RVM's 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).