A parameter-free determination of the fine-structure constant from information-democratic lattice gauge theory

We present a parameter-free route to the electromagnetic fine-structure constant from three ingredients: (i) an information-democracy condition fixing the bare coupling at the democratic point, (ii) Standard Model anomaly cancellation fixing the effective charge-squared factor N_eff = 8, and (iii) a one-loop lattice vacuum-polarization computation on the compact-U(1) Brillouin zone. Using known QED vacuum-polarization constants through four loops and an explicit UV-weighted estimate of the lattice/continuum scheme-matching systematic, we obtain alpha^{-1} = 137.0375 ± 0.023. Files included:- manuscript PDF- LaTeX source- deterministic lattice computation script Companion theorem paper: 10.5281/zenodo.18926979