Nuclear Data in Oklo and Time-Variability of Fundamental Coupling Constants

Abstract

We re-examined Shlyakhter's analysis of the Sm data in Oklo. With a special care of minimizing contamination due to the inflow of the isotope after the end of the reactor activity, we confirmed that his result on the time-variability of the fine-structure constant, $|\dotα/α|\lsim 10^{-17}{\rm y}^{-1}$, was basically correct. In addition to this upper bound, however, we obtained another result that indicates a different value of $α$ 2 billion years ago. We add comments on the recent result from QSO's.

3 pages, 1 figure, presented at Int. Conf. on Nuclear Data for Science and Technology, ND2001, 7-12 October, 2001, Tsukuba, Japan