Speaker
Description
The most promising theoretical models to resolve the H0 tension also predict temporal or spatial variations of the constants of nature such as the fine structure constant, alpha. We make use of novel astronomical instrumentation to remove previously dominant systematic effects, thus reaching precision of 1 part per million or better in measuring any departure of the fine structure constant from its terrestrial value. A new advanced tool using Artificial Intelligence algorithms, AI-VPFIT, was developed to aid the analysis. AI-VPFIT provides robust and objective measurements free from human bias and allows us to explore the impact of model non-uniqueness for the first time. I will present our most recent results, including the first constraint on small-scale variations of alpha. Finally, we put constraints on Bekenstein and quintessence-type dark energy models.
