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Supernova Cosmology and the Fine Structure Constant

Abstract We study the dependence of the peak luminosity of Type Ia supernovae onthe ﬁne structure constant α. We ﬁnd that decreasing (increasing) α enhances(reduces) the luminosity. Future experiments like SNAP could determine thevariation of α to a precision of 10 −2 .I. INTRODUCTION Recently, the possibility of the variation of fundamental “constants” (especially the ﬁnestructure constant α and the gravitational constant G) has attracted much attention. [1].Recent evidence that the value of α was smaller in the past from observations of a numberof absorption systems in the spectra of distant quasars has stimulated interest in this topic.[2,3] From an anthropic point of view, it is also intriguing to examine how changing physicalconstants would aﬀect the structure of the universe we observe.The magnitude of the variation of α over time on a cosmological scale is constrainedby several observations: those of the absorption/emission lines of distant objects, yieldinginformation on the variation of ﬁne-splitting (0.5 < z < 4), those of spectrum of cosmicmicrowave background anisotropies, yielding information on the variation of the recombi-nation process (z = 1000), and those of Big Bang nucleosynthesis, yielding information onthe variation of the masses of the proton and neutron (z = 10