PROBING FUNDAMENTAL CONSTANT EVOLUTION WITH NEUTRAL ATOMIC GAS LINES
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We have detected narrow HI 21cm and CI absorption at $z \sim 1.4 - 1.6$ towards Q0458$-$020 and Q2337$-$011, and use these lines to test for possible changes in the fine structure constant $\alpha$, the proton-electron mass ratio $\mu$, and the proton gyromagnetic ratio $g_p$. A comparison between the HI 21cm and CI line redshifts yields $\Delta X/X = [+6.8 \pm 1.0] \times 10^{-6}$ over $0 < <z> \le 1.46$, where $X = g_p \alpha^2/\mu$, and the errors are purely statistical, from the gaussian fits. The simple line profiles and the high sensitivity of the spectra imply that statistical errors in this comparison are an order of magnitude lower than in previous studies. Further, the CI lines arise in cold neutral gas that also gives rise to HI 21cm absorption, and both background quasars are core-dominated, reducing the likelihood of systematic errors due to local velocity offsets between the hyperfine and resonance lines. The dominant source of systematic error lies in the absolute wavelength calibration of the optical spectra, which appears uncertain to $\sim 2$ km/s, yielding a maximum error in $\Delta X/X$ of $\sim 6.7 \times 10^{-6}$. Including this, we obtain $\Delta X/X = [+6.8 \pm 1.0 (statistical) \pm 6.7 (max. systematic)] \times 10^{-6}$ over $0 < <z> \le 1.46$. Using literature constraints on $\Delta \mu/\mu$, this is inconsistent with claims of a smaller value of $\alpha$ from the many-multiplet method, unless fractional changes in $g_p$ are larger than those in $\alpha$ and $\mu$.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it