Speaker
Stefania Pandolfi
(Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen)
Description
Beyond the standard cosmological mode, in which the Dark Energy is provided by the Cosmological Constant, the late-time accelerated expansion of the Universe can be reproduced by the introduction of an additional dynamical scalar field. In this case, the field is expected to be naturally coupled to the rest of the theory's fields, unless a (still unknown) symmetry suppresses this coupling. After a brief introduction about Dark Energy, the history of its "discovery" and its theoretical problems, I will show some results of the study of the possible coupling between a dynamical Dark Energy model and the electromagnetic field, and the corresponding evolution of the fine structure constant with the respect to the standard local value.
