On Th229 and time-dependent fundamental constants

Understand

The electromagnetic transition between the almost degenerate 5/2+ and 3/2+ states in Th229 is deemed to be very sensitive to potential changes in the fine structure constant alpha.

• State of the art Hartree-Fock and Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov calculations are performed to compute the difference in Coulomb energies of the two states which determines the amplification of variations in alpha into variations of the transition frequency.
• The kinetic energies are also calculated which reflect a possible variation in the nucleon or quark masses.
• A generalized Hellmann-Feynman theorem is proved including the use of density-matrix functionals.