A Brief History of the Fine Structure Constant

Last Word

It should be noted that these measurements are very difficult to make. They must have enough resolution to allow very precise measurements of the shifts in the spectra and a sufficient number of photons to provide a statistically unambiguous result. For example, Petitjean and Srianand's measurements were of the spectras of 18 distant quasars over a total of 34 nights using the ultraviolet and visible Echelle spectrograph and ESO's Kueyen 8.2 meter telescope at the Paranal observatory. This combination resulted in unequalled spectral quality of the data whose results went back to roughly 25 percent of the Universe's current age. Finally, I would like to add that the fine structure constant is also known as the effective interaction strength in hadronic interactions and does, as previously mentioned, increase at small distances or high momentum transfers.

Click Here to go to Bibliography