The Wall of Fundamental Constants

Understand

We consider the signatures of a domain wall produced in the spontaneous symmetry breaking involving a dilaton-like scalar field coupled to electromagnetism.

• Domains on either side of the wall exhibit slight differences in their respective values of the fine-structure constant, alpha.
• If such a wall is present within our Hubble volume, absorption spectra at large redshifts may or may not provide a variation in alpha relative to the terrestrial value, depending on our relative position with respect to the wall.
• This wall could resolve the ``contradiction'' between claims of a variation of alpha based on Keck/Hires data and of the constancy of alpha based on VLT data.