Recent research show that the cosmological components of the Universe should influence on the propagation of Gravitational Waves (GWs) and even it has been proposed a new way to measure the cosmological constant using Pulsar Timing Arrays (PTAs). However, these results have considered very particular cases (e.g. a de Sitter Universe or a mixing with non-relativistic matter). In this work we propose an extension of these results, using the Hubble constant as the natural parameter that includes all the cosmological information and studying its effect on the propagation of GWs. Using linearized gravity we considered a mixture of perfect fluids permeating the spacetime and studied the propagation of GWs within the context of the LCDM model. We found from numerical simulations that the timing residual of local pulsars should present a distinguishable peak depending on the local value of the Hubble constant. As a consequence, when assuming the standard LCDM model, our result predicts that the region of maximum timing residual is determined by the redshift of the source. This framework represents a new test for the standard cosmological model, and it can be used to facilitate the measurements of gravitational wave by ongoing PTAs projects.
We review the current observational status of string cosmology when confronted with experimental datasets. We begin by defining common observational parameters and discuss how they are determined for a given model. Then we review the observable footprints of several string theoretic models, discussing the significance of various potential signals. Throughout we comment on present and future prospects of finding evidence for string theory in cosmology, and on significant issues for the future.
Cosmology has made enormous progress through studies of the cosmic microwave background, however the subtle signals being now sought such as B-mode polarisation due to primordial gravitational waves are increasingly hard to disentangle from residual Galactic foregrounds in the derived CMB maps. We revisit our finding that on large angular scales there are traces of the nearby old supernova remnant Loop I in the WMAP 9-year map of the CMB and confirm this with the new SMICA map from the Planck satellite.
We study the observational signatures of two-form field in the inflationary cosmology. In our setup a two-form field is kinetically coupled to a spectator scalar field and generates sizable gravitational waves and smaller curvature perturbation. We find that the sourced gravitational waves have a distinct signature: they are always statistically anisotropic and their spherical moments are non-zero for hexadecapole and tetrahexacontapole, while the quadrupole moment vanishes. Since their amplitude can reach $\mathcal{O}(10^{-3})$ in the tensor-to-scalar ratio, we expect this novel prediction wi…
We discuss a new scenario for early cosmology when the inflationary de Sitter phase emerges dynamically. This genuine quantum effect occurs as a result of dynamics of the topologically nontrivial sectors in a strongly coupled QCD- like gauge theory in an expanding universe. We test these ideas by explicit computations in hyperbolic space $ \mathbb{H}^3_κ\times \mathbb{S}^1_{κ^{-1}}$. We argue that the key element for this idea to work is the presence of nontrivial holonomy computed along $\mathbb{S}^1_{κ^{-1}}$. The effect is non-local in nature, non-analytical in coupling constant and can not…
We consider a Weyl-invariant formulation of gravity with a cosmological constant in d-dimensional spacetime and show that near two dimensions the classical action reduces to the timelike Liouville action. We show that the renormalized cosmological term leads to a nonlocal quantum momentum tensor which satisfies theWard identities in a nontrivial way. The resulting evolution equations for an isotropic, homogeneous universe lead to a slowly decaying vacuum energy and a power-law expansion. We outline the implications for the cosmological constant problem, inflation, and dark energy.
It is shown that any homogeneous and isotropic universe, independently of its spatial topology and matter content, allows for the presence of a conformal stealth, i.e. a nontrivial conformally invariant scalar field with vanishing energy-momentum tensor, which evolves along with the universe without causing even the smallest backreaction. Surprisingly, this gravitationally invisible universal witness is inhomogeneous with zero consequences for the underlying cosmology. Additionally, it is shown that these results are not exclusive of a four-dimensional universe by generalizing them to higher d…
Loop Quantum Gravity (L.Q.G.) is one of the two most promising tentative theory for a quantum description of gravity. When applied to the entire universe, the so-called Loop Quantum Cosmology (L.Q.C.) framework offers microscopical models of the very early stages of the cosmological history, potentially solving the initial singularity problem via bouncing solutions or setting the universe in the appropriate initial conditions for inflation to start, via a phase of super-inflation. More interestingly, L.Q.C. could leave a footprint on cosmological observables such as the Cosmic Microwave Backgr…
It is shown that topological changes in space-time are necessary to make General Relativity compatible with the Newtonian limit and to solve the hierarchy of the fundamental interactions. We detail how topology and topological changes appear in General Relativity and how it leaves an observable footprint in space-time. In cosmology we show that such topological observable is the cosmic radiation produced by the acceleration of the universe. The cosmological constant is a very particular case which occurs when the expansion of the universe into the vacuum occurs only in the direction of the cos…
In this paper we analyze the spectrum of the primordial gravitational waves (GWs) predicted in the Standard Model*Axion*Seesaw*Higgs portal inflation (SMASH) model, which was proposed as a minimal extension of the Standard Model that addresses five fundamental problems of particle physics and cosmology (inflation, baryon asymmetry, neutrino masses, strong CP problem, and dark matter) in one stroke. The SMASH model has a unique prediction for the critical temperature of the second order Peccei-Quinn (PQ) phase transition $T_c \sim 10^8\,\mathrm{GeV}$ up to the uncertainty in the calculation of …
General relativity (GR) extensions based on renormalization group (RG) flows may lead to scale-dependent couplings with nontrivial effects at large distance scales. Here we develop further the approach in which RG effects at large distance scales are fully encoded in an effective action and we apply it to cosmology. In order to evaluate the cosmological consequences, our main assumption is the use of a RG scale such that the (infrared) RG effects only appear at perturbative order (not at the background level). The emphasis here is on analytical results and qualitative understanding of the impl…
We consider the FRW cosmological model in which the matter content of universe (playing a role of inflaton or quintessence) is given by a novel generalization of the massive scalar field. The latter is a scalar version of the recently introduced Nonlinear Field Space Theory (NFST), where physical phase space of a given field is assumed to be compactified at large energies. For our analysis we choose the simple case of a field with the spherical phase space and endow it with the generalized Hamiltonian analogous to the XXZ Heisenberg model, normally describing a system of spins in condensed mat…
Royal Observatory Edinburgh（爱丁堡皇家天文台）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford（牛津大学鲁道夫·皮尔斯理论物理中心）；Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute（韩国天体物理学与空间科学研究所）；Lahore University of Management Sciences（拉合尔管理科学大学）；NED University of Engineering and Technology（尼赫鲁工程与技术大学）
It has been recently argued \cite{Barvinsky:2017lfl} that the de Sitter phase in cosmology might be naturally generated as a result of dynamics of the topologically nontrivial sectors in a strongly coupled QCD-like gauge theory in expanding universe. It is known that the de Sitter phase is realized in the history of our Universe twice: the first occurrence is coined as the inflation, while the second time (which is occurring now) is dubbed as the dark energy (DE). The crucial element of the proposal \cite{Barvinsky:2017lfl} is the presence of a nontrivial gauge holonomy which is the source of …
The large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe displays a complex pattern of clusters, super-clusters, filaments and voids with sizes limited only by the boundaries of the available samples. A quantitative statistical characterization of these structures shows that galaxy distribution is inhomogeneous in these samples, being characterized by large-amplitude fluctuations of large spatial extension. Over a large range of scales, both the average conditional density and its variance show a nontrivial scaling behavior: at small scales, r<20 Mpc/h, the average (conditional) density scales…
The multi-parameter character of supersymmetric dark-matter models implies the combination of their experimental studies with astrophysical and cosmological probes. The physics of the early Universe provides nontrivial effects of non-equilibrium particles and primordial cosmological structures. Primordial black holes (PBHs) are a profound signature of such structures that may arise as a cosmological consequence of supersymmetric (SUSY) models. SUSY-based mechanisms of baryosynthesis can lead to the possibility of antimatter domains in a baryon asymmetric Universe. In the context of cosmopartic…
Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density perturbations and gravitational waves. We show that constraints on the duration of inflation together with the BICEP3/Keck bounds on the gravitational wave background imply that higher derivatives of the potential are nontrivial with a confidence of 99%. Such terms contribute to the scale-dependence, or running, of the density perturbation spectrum. We clarify the…
