https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-017-4714-z
Regular Article - Theoretical Physics
Running vacuum in the Universe and the time variation of the fundamental constants of Nature
1
Institute for Advanced Study, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
2
Physik-Department, Universität München, 80333, Munich, Germany
3
Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica, Universitat de Barcelona, Av. Diagonal 647, 08028, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
4
Institute of Cosmos Sciences, Universitat de Barcelona (ICCUB), Av. Diagonal 647, 08028, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
5
Dept. de Física, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Juiz de Fora, MG, 36036-330, Brazil
* e-mail: sola@fqa.ub.edu
Received:
8
August
2016
Accepted:
24
February
2017
Published online:
27
March
2017
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 (RVMs) of the cosmic evolution. Recently, compelling evidence has been provided that these models are able to fit the main cosmological data (SNIa+BAO+H(z)+LSS+BBN+CMB) significantly better than the concordance 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
. 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 evolution of the dark matter particle masses 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–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).
© The Author(s), 2017