Abstract
The possible variation of the electromagnetic fine structure constant, αe, at cosmological scales has aroused great interest in recent years. Strongly lensed gravitational waves (GWs) and their electromagnetic counterparts could be used to test this variation. Under the assumption that the speed of a photon can be modified, whereas the speed of a GW is the same as predicted by general relativity, and they both propagate in a flat Friedman-Robertson-Walker universe, we investigated the difference in time delays of the images and derived the upper bound of the variation of αe. For a typical lensing system in the standard cosmological models, we obtained Bcosθ⩽1.85 × 10−5, where B is the dipolar amplitude and θ is the angle between observation and the preferred direction. Our result is consistent with the most up-to-date observations on αe. In addition, the observations of strongly lensed GWs and their electromagnetic counterparts could be used to test which types of alternative theories of gravity can account for the variation of αe.
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