Alpha Screening

The fine-structure constant α is screened by gravitational interaction at cosmological scales. This connects the EM and gravitational sectors and may resolve the coincidence problem.

Last updated: August 2026

The Screening Mechanism

In the CPT framework, gravity is the double copy of electromagnetism. This means every electromagnetic interaction has a corresponding gravitational counterpart at order . At short distances (sub-atomic), this gravitational coupling is negligible. At cosmological scales (order ), it is not.

The effective fine-structure constant at scale is:

Gravitationally screened α · valid for

The Coincidence Problem

The gravitational coupling constant is:

The ratio is a famously mysterious large number. The coincidence problem asks: why does this ratio happen to be close to the number of atoms in the observable universe () divided by the ratio ?

In the CPT framework on , this is not a coincidence. The Mach closure condition relates and to . Combined with the double-copy relation, the large-number ratio is fixed by the geometry of .

Wave-Mechanical Alpha

The wave-mechanical investigation of (documented in a_geom_gap2_wave_mechanical_alpha_results) confirmed power-law scaling via sub-wavelength dipole source coupling. This is tagged [E] and banked (August 2026). See Wave-Mechanical α for the full result.

Integrity Status

[E]

Established. The gravitational running of

follows from the double-copy structure of Weber gravity. The numerical smallness of the correction at laboratory scales is established. The connection to the coincidence problem is a consequence of Mach closure.

Source Documents

The primary research documents underlying this page. All files are freely viewable and downloadable. They represent the working research as written — including integrity tags, equations, and finding IDs.

Documents open in the CPT Research Library — a formatted viewer for all source research files.