Which fundamental constants for cosmic microwave background and baryon-acoustic oscillation?

James Rich (1)

1 DPhP - Département de Physique des Particules (ex SPP)

We use the three-scale framework of Hu et al. to show how the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy spectrum depends on the fundamental constants. As expected, the spectrum depends only on dimensionless combinations of the constants, and we emphasize the points that make this generally true for cosmological observables. Our analysis suggests that the CMB spectrum shape is mostly determined by α2me/mp and by mp/mχ, the proton-CDM-particle mass ratio. The distance to the last-scattering surface depends on Gmpmχ/ ħc, so published CMB observational limits on time variations of the constants implicitly assume the time independence of this quantity, as well as a flat-ΛCDM cosmological model. On the other hand, low-redshift baryon-acoustic oscillation, H0, and baryon-mass-fraction measurements can be combined with the shape of the CMB spectrum to give information that is largely independent of these assumptions. In particular, we show that the pre-recombination values of Gm2χ/ħc, mp/mχ, and α2me/mp are equal to their present values at a precision of ~15%.

Keywords: cosmic background radiation

Domains: Astrophysics [astro-ph]

James Rich. Which fundamental constants for cosmic microwave background and baryon-acoustic oscillation?. Astronomy and Astrophysics - A&A, 2015, 584, pp.A69. ⟨10.1051/0004-6361/201526847⟩. ⟨cea-01383768⟩