A variety of gauges are used in cosmological perturbation theory. These are often chosen in order to attribute physical properties to a particular choice of coordinates, or otherwise to simplify the form of the resultant equations. Calculations are then performed with the understanding that they could have been done in any gauge, and that transformations between different gauges can be made at will. We show that this logic can be extended to the domain of large density contrasts, where different types of perturbative expansion are required, but that the way in which gauges can be chosen in the presence of such structures is severely constrained. In particular, most gauges that are commonly considered in the cosmology literature are found to be unviable in the presence of non-linear structures. This includes spatially flat gauge, synchronous gauge, comoving orthogonal gauge, total matter gauge, N-body gauge, and the uniform density gauge. In contrast, we find that the longitudinal gauge and the Newtonian motion gauge are both viable choices in both standard cosmological perturbation theory, and in the post-Newtonian perturbative expansions that are required in order to model non-linear structures.
We compare theoretical predictions with observations for a class of cosmological models in which the dark energy component is modeled as a fermionic condensate, non-minimally coupled with the gravitational field and characterized by some specific self-interaction potentials. Our analysis is based on the Markov Chain Monte Carlo Method (MCMC) and employs different data sets. It turns out that with an appropriate choice of parameters our models are fully compatible with several observed data. We combine these parameter values with phase space analysis to deduce the features of the entire cosmic …
Testing a subset of viable cosmological models beyond General Relativity (GR), with implications for cosmic acceleration and the Dark Energy associated with it, is within the reach of Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and a part of its endeavor. Deviations from GR-w(z)CDM models can manifest in the growth rate of structure and lensing, as well as in screening effects on non-linear scales. We explore the constraining power of small-scale deviations predicted by the f(R) Hu-Sawicki Modified Gravity (MG) candidate, by emulating this model with COLA (COmoving Lagrangian Acce…
The Pre-Big Bang cosmology inspired generations of cosmologists in attempts to cure the initial Big Bang singularity using a fundamental length scale as proposed by String Theory. The existence of a phase of collapse/inflation with increasing curvature followed by a cosmic bounce has been proposed as an alternative to standard inflation in the solution of the horizon and curvature problems. However the generation of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of perturbations is not an automatic prediction of such scenarios. In this paper I review some general statements about the evolution of perturbat…
We propose a new framework for studying the cosmology of $f(R)$ gravity which completely avoids using the reconstruction programme. This allows us to easily obtain a qualitative feel of how much the $Λ$CDM model differs from other $f(R)$ theories of gravity at the level of linear perturbation theory for theories that share the same background dynamics. This is achieved by using the standard model independent cosmographic parameters to develop a new dynamical system formulation of $f(R)$ gravity which is free from the limitation of having to first specify the functional form of $f(R)$. By consi…
Attempts at constraining theories of late time accelerated expansion often assume broad priors for the parameters in their phenomenological description. Focusing on shift-symmetric scalar-tensor theories with standard gravitational wave speed, we show how a more careful analysis of their dynamical evolution leads to much narrower priors. In doing so, we propose a simple and accurate parametrisation of these theories, capturing the redshift dependence of the equation of state, $w(z)$, and the kinetic braiding parameter, $α_{\rm B}(z)$, with only two parameters each, and derive their statistical…
The gravitino problem is investigated in the framework of Extended Gravity cosmologies. In particular, we consider $f(R)$ gravity, the most natural extension of the Hilbert-Einstein action, and $f(\cal T)$ gravity, the extension of teleparallel equivalent gravity. Since in these theories the expansion laws of the Universe are modified, as compared to the standard $Λ$CDM cosmology, it follows that also the thermal history of particles gets modified. We show that $f(R)$ models allow to avoid the late abundance of gravitinos. In particular, we found that for an appropriate choice of the parameter…
A new formulation for light propagation in geometric optics by means of the Bi-local Geodesic Operators is considered. We develop the BiGONLight Mathematica package, uniquely designed to apply this framework to compute optical observables in Numerical Relativity. Our package can be used for light propagation on a wide range of scales and redshifts and accepts numerical as well as analytical input for the spacetime metric. In this paper we focus on two cosmological observables, the redshift and the angular diameter distance, specializing our analysis to a wall universe modeled within the post-N…
In this paper, we study the phase space of cosmological models in the context of Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory. More specifically, we consider a generalized dynamical system that encapsulates the main features of the theory and for the cases that this is rendered autonomous, we analyze its equilibrium points and stable and unstable manifolds corresponding to several distinct cosmological evolutions. As we demonstrate, the phase space is quite rich and contains invariant structures, which dictate the conditions under which the theory may be valid and viable in describing the evolution Universe d…
In this paper, we first provide a brief review of the effective dynamics of two recently well-studied models of modified loop quantum cosmologies (mLQCs), which arise from different regularizations of the Hamiltonian constraint and show the robustness of a generic resolution of the big bang singularity, replaced by a quantum bounce due to non-perturbative Planck scale effects. As in loop quantum cosmology (LQC), in these modified models the slow-roll inflation happens generically. We consider the cosmological perturbations following the dressed and hybrid approaches and clarify some subtle iss…
Simple cosmological models based upon five-dimensional Kaluza-Klein relativity are re-examined and interesting properties are indicated. These models are special cases of those obtained by Davidson et al. and Mann and Vincent, specifically, those with vanishing cosmological constant. No five-dimensional sources are present: the solutions are Ricci-flat in five dimensions. Electromagnetic degrees of freedom are assumed not to be excited, consequently the four-dimensional stress-energy tensor induced by dimensional reduction is entirely due to the scalar field, obeying the radiation equation of …
The quantum theory of the Friedmann cosmological model with dust and cosmological constant ($Λ$) is not exactly solvable analytically. We apply Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) techniques to study its quantum dynamics using the physical Hamiltonian corresponding to the dust field as a clock. We study (i) quantum fluctuations around classical paths and (ii) formulate the analogues of the no-boundary and tunnelling proposals and simulate the ground state wave functions. For $Λ< 0$ a unique ground state wave function exists. For $Λ> 0$ the physical Hamiltonian is not bounded below, but the path i…
We revisit a general minisuperspace (MSS) formalism for scalar-tensor (ST) FLRW type cosmological models in arbitrary frame with perfect fluid source. We discuss how to impose Cauchy data on the corresponding dynamical system in order to reconstruct standard (ΛCDM) cosmological model. So far, the integrability of such models has been extensively studied in the Einstein or Jordan frames mainly. We extend these studies to arbitrary frame taking into account non-minimal coupling between matter and gravity. To this aim we explore a gauge freedom associated with a choice of lapse function. We show …
我们研究了Chaobergin和粘性统一宇宙学的非线性球形“礼帽”坍缩。术语统一是指暗能量和暗物质被一个单一的成分所取代的模型。对于广义Chaubergin气体（GCG），我们推广了[R. A. A. Fernandes { \it et al}. Physical Review D 85，083501（2012）]。讨论了含$α=0$的GCG模型与$Λ$ CDM模型在非线性水平上的差异。我们表明，两者确实是不同的。本文还研究了由于非绝热扰动的存在而不同于GCG的体粘模型。在这种情况下，聚类过程通常被抑制，并且加速背景膨胀的粘性模型的可行参数空间不会导致塌陷结构。这一结果对统一粘性模型的可行性提出了挑战。
In this work we investigate the inflationary phenomenological implications of a recently developed ghost-free Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity. The resulting theory can be viewed as a scalar Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity, so by employing the formalism for cosmological perturbations for the latter theory, we calculate the slow-roll indices and the observational indices, and we compare these with the latest observational data. Due to the presence of a freely chosen function in the model, in principle any cosmological evolution can be realized, so we specify the Hubble rate and the freely…
Based upon the intrinsic symmetries approach to inhomogeneous cosmologies, we propose an exact solution to Einstein's field equations where the spatial sections are flat and the source is a non-perfect fluid such that the dissipative terms can be written in terms of spatial gradients of the energy density under a suitable choice of the coordinate system. It is shown through the calculation of the luminosity distance as a function of the redshift that the presence of such inhomogeneities may lead to an effective deceleration parameter compatible with either the standard $Λ$CDM model or LTB mode…
Recently, States of Low Energy (SLEs) have been proposed as viable vacuum states of primordial perturbations within Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC). In this work we investigate the effect of the high curvature region of LQC on the definition of SLEs. Shifting the support of the test function that defines them away from this regime results in primordial power spectra of perturbations closer to those of the so-called Non-oscillatory (NO) vacuum, which is another viable choice of initial conditions previously introduced in the LQC context. Furthermore, through a comparison with the Hadamard-like SLE…
