We investigate a model that modifies general relativity on cosmological scales, specifically by having a `glitch' in the gravitational constant between the cosmological (super-horizon) and Newtonian (sub-horizon) regimes, as motivated e.g. in the Hořava-Lifshitz proposal or in the Einstein-aether framework. This gives a single-parameter extension to the standard ΛCDM model, which is equivalent to adding a dark energy component, but where the energy density of this component can have either sign. Fitting to data from the Planck satellite, we find that negative contributions are, in fact, preferred. Additionally, we find that roughly one percent weaker superhorizon gravity can somewhat ease the Hubble and clustering tensions in a range of cosmological observations, although at the expense of spoiling fits to the baryonic acoustic oscillation scale in galaxy surveys. Therefore, the extra parametric freedom offered by our model deserves further exploration, and we discuss how future observations may elucidate this potential cosmic glitch in gravity, through a four-fold reduction in statistical uncertainties.
The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) was founded in 1978 and was the first institution in Italy to promote post-graduate courses leading to a Doctor Philosophiae (or PhD) degree. A centre of excellence among Italian and international universities, the school has around 65 teachers, 100 post docs and 245 PhD students, and is located in Trieste, in a campus of more than 10 hectares with wonderful views over the Gulf of Trieste.
SISSA hosts a very high-ranking, large and multidisciplinary scientific research output. The scientific papers produced by its researchers are published in high impact factor, well-known international journals, and in many cases in the world's most prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and Science. Over 900 students have so far started their careers in the field of mathematics, physics and neuroscience research at SISSA.
ISSN: 1475-7516
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) covers all aspects of cosmology and particle astrophysics and encompasses theoretical, observational and experimental areas as well as computation and simulation. An electronic-only journal, JCAP is jointly owned by IOP Publishing and SISSA.
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Wendy L. Freedman and Barry F. Madore JCAP11(2023)050
One of the most exciting and pressing issues in cosmology today is the discrepancy between some measurements of the local Hubble constant and other values of the expansion rate inferred from the observed temperature and polarization fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Resolving these differences holds the potential for the discovery of new physics beyond the standard model of cosmology: Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), a successful model that has been in place for more than 20 years. Given both the fundamental significance of this outstanding discrepancy, and the many-decades-long effort to increase the accuracy of the extragalactic distance scale, it is critical to demonstrate that the local measurements are convincingly free from residual systematic errors. We review the progress over the past quarter century in measurements of the local value of the Hubble constant, and discuss remaining challenges. Particularly exciting are new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), for which we present an overview of our program and first results. We focus in particular on Cepheids and the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) stars, as well as a relatively new method, the JAGB (J-Region Asymptotic Giant Branch) method, all methods that currently exhibit the demonstrably smallest statistical and systematic uncertainties. JWST is delivering high-resolution near-infrared imaging data to both test for and to address directly several of the systematic uncertainties that have historically limited the accuracy of extragalactic distance scale measurements (e.g., the dimming effects of interstellar dust, chemical composition differences in the atmospheres of stars, and the crowding and blending of Cepheids contaminated by nearby previously unresolved stars). For the first galaxy in our program, NGC 7250, the high-resolution JWST images demonstrate that many of the Cepheids observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are significantly crowded by nearby neighbors. Avoiding the more significantly crowded variables, the scatter in the JWST near-infrared (NIR) Cepheid PL relation is decreased by a factor of two compared to those from HST, illustrating the power of JWST for improvements to local measurements of H0. Ultimately, these data will either confirm the standard model, or provide robust evidence for the inclusion of additional new physics.
Marco Cirelli et al JCAP03(2011)051
We provide ingredients and recipes for computing signals of TeV-scale Dark Matter annihilations and decays in the Galaxy and beyond. For each DM channel, we present the energy spectra of at production, computed by high-statistics simulations. We estimate the Monte Carlo uncertainty by comparing the results yielded by the Pythia and Herwig event generators. We then provide the propagation functions for charged particles in the Galaxy, for several DM distribution profiles and sets of propagation parameters. Propagation of e± is performed with an improved semi-analytic method that takes into account position-dependent energy losses in the Milky Way. Using such propagation functions, we compute the energy spectra of e±, and at the location of the Earth. We then present the gamma ray fluxes, both from prompt emission and from Inverse Compton scattering in the galactic halo. Finally, we provide the spectra of extragalactic gamma rays. All results areavailable in numerical form and ready to be consumed.
Peter Ade et al JCAP02(2019)056
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 μK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r)=0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 μK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources.
Marica Branchesi et al JCAP07(2023)068
The Einstein Telescope (ET), the European project for a third-generation gravitational-wave detector, has a reference configuration based on a triangular shape consisting of three nested detectors with 10 km arms, where each detector has a 'xylophone' configuration made of an interferometer tuned toward high frequencies, and an interferometer tuned toward low frequencies and working at cryogenic temperature. Here, we examine the scientific perspectives under possible variations of this reference design. We perform a detailed evaluation of the science case for a single triangular geometry observatory, and we compare it with the results obtained for a network of two L-shaped detectors (either parallel or misaligned) located in Europe, considering different choices of arm-length for both the triangle and the 2L geometries. We also study how the science output changes in the absence of the low-frequency instrument, both for the triangle and the 2L configurations. We examine a broad class of simple 'metrics' that quantify the science output, related to compact binary coalescences, multi-messenger astronomy and stochastic backgrounds, and we then examine the impact of different detector designs on a more specific set of scientific objectives.
Luis A. Escamilla et al JCAP05(2024)091
We critically examine the state of current constraints on the dark energy (DE) equation of state (EoS) w. Our study is motivated by the observation that, while broadly consistent with the cosmological constant value w = -1, several independent probes appear to point towards a slightly phantom EoS (w ∼ -1.03) which, if confirmed, could have important implications for the Hubble tension. We pay attention to the apparent preference for phantom DE from Planck Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data alone, whose origin we study in detail and attribute to a wide range of (physical and geometrical) effects. We deem the combination of Planck CMB, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, Type Ia Supernovae, and Cosmic Chronometers data to be particularly trustworthy, inferring from this final consensus dataset w = -1.013+0.038-0.043, in excellent agreement with the cosmological constant value. Overall, despite a few scattered hints, we find no compelling evidence forcing us away from the cosmological constant (yet).
J. Ambjørn and Y. Watabiki JCAP12(2023)011
We show that by allowing our Universe to merge with other universes one is lead to modified Friedmann equations that explain the present accelerated expansion of our Universe without the need of a cosmological constant.
Enrique Gaztañaga and K. Sravan Kumar JCAP06(2024)001
In this paper, we present compelling evidence for the parity asymmetry (a discrete symmetry separate from isotropy) in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) map, measured through two-point temperature correlations. Any asymmetry associated with discrete symmetries, such as parity, challenges our understanding of quantum physics associated with primordial physics rather than LCDM (Λ Cold-Dark-Matter) itself. We commence by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the Planck CMB, focusing on the distribution of power in low-multipoles and temperature anticorrelations at parity conjugate points in position space. We find tension with the near scale-invariant power-law power spectrum of Standard Inflation (SI), with p-values of the order (10-4 - 10-3). Alternatively, we explore the framework of direct-sum inflation (DSI), where a quantum fluctuation arises as a direct sum of two components evolving forward and backward in time at parity conjugate points in physical space. This mechanism results in a parity-asymmetric scale-dependent power spectrum, particularly prominent at low-multipoles, without any additional free model parameters. Our findings indicate that DSI is consistent with data on parity asymmetry, the absence of power at θ > 60°, and power suppression at low-even-multipoles which are major data anomalies in the SI model. Furthermore, we discover that the parameters characterizing the hemispherical power asymmetry anomaly become statistically insignificant when the large SI quadrupole amplitude is reduced to align with the data. DSI explains this low quadrupole with a p-value of 3.5%, 39 times higher than SI. Combining statistics from parameters measuring parity and low-ℓ angular power spectrum, we find that DSI is 50-650 times more probable than SI. In summary, our investigation suggests that while CMB temperature fluctuations exhibit homogeneity and isotropy, they also display parity-asymmetric behavior consistent with predictions of DSI. This observation provides a tantalizing evidence for the quantum mechanical nature of gravity.
R. Adhikari et al JCAP01(2017)025
We present a comprehensive review of keV-scale sterile neutrino Dark Matter, collecting views and insights from all disciplines involved—cosmology, astrophysics, nuclear, and particle physics—in each case viewed from both theoretical and experimental/observational perspectives. After reviewing the role of active neutrinos in particle physics, astrophysics, and cosmology, we focus on sterile neutrinos in the context of the Dark Matter puzzle. Here, we first review the physics motivation for sterile neutrino Dark Matter, based on challenges and tensions in purely cold Dark Matter scenarios. We then round out the discussion by critically summarizing all known constraints on sterile neutrino Dark Matter arising from astrophysical observations, laboratory experiments, and theoretical considerations. In this context, we provide a balanced discourse on the possibly positive signal from X-ray observations. Another focus of the paper concerns the construction of particle physics models, aiming to explain how sterile neutrinos of keV-scale masses could arise in concrete settings beyond the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The paper ends with an extensive review of current and future astrophysical and laboratory searches, highlighting new ideas and their experimental challenges, as well as future perspectives for the discovery of sterile neutrinos.
Matteo Forconi et al JCAP05(2024)097
The very first light captured by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed a population of galaxies at very high redshifts more massive than expected in the canonical ΛCDM model of structure formation. Barring, among others, a systematic origin of the issue, in this paper, we test alternative cosmological perturbation histories. We argue that models with a larger matter component Ωm and/or a larger scalar spectral index ns can substantially improve the fit to JWST measurements. In this regard, phenomenological extensions related to the dark energy sector of the theory are appealing alternatives, with Early Dark Energy emerging as an excellent candidate to explain (at least in part) the unexpected JWST preference for larger stellar mass densities. Conversely, Interacting Dark Energy models, despite producing higher values of matter clustering parameters such as σ8, are generally disfavored by JWST measurements. This is due to the energy-momentum flow from the dark matter to the dark energy sector, implying a smaller matter energy density. Upcoming observations may either strengthen the evidence or falsify some of these appealing phenomenological alternatives to the simplest ΛCDM picture.
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Ricardo Z. Ferreira et al JCAP06(2024)020
Unstable domain wall (DW) networks in the early universe are cosmologically viable and can emit a large amount of gravitational waves (GW) before annihilating. As such, they provide an interpretation for the recent signal reported by Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) collaborations. A related important question is whether such a scenario also leads to significant production of Primordial Black Holes (PBH). We investigate both GW and PBH production using 3D numerical simulations in an expanding background, with box sizes up to N = 3240, including the annihilation phase. We find that: i) the network decays exponentially, i.e. the false vacuum volume drops as ∼ exp(-η3), with η the conformal time; ii) the GW spectrum is larger than traditional estimates by more than one order of magnitude, due to a delay between DW annihilation and the sourcing of GWs. We then present a novel semi-analytical method to estimate the PBH abundances: rare false vacuum pockets of super-Hubble size collapse to PBHs if their energy density becomes comparable to the background when they cross the Hubble scale. Smaller (but more abundant) pockets will instead collapse only if they are close to spherical. This introduces very large uncertainties in the final PBH abundance. The first phenomenological implication is that the DW interpretation of the PTA signal is compatible with observational constraints on PBHs, within the uncertainties. Second, in a different parameter region, the dark matter can be entirely in the form of asteroid-mass PBHs from the DW collapse. Remarkably, this would also lead to a GW background in the observable range of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and future interferometers, such as LISA and Einstein Telescope.
M. Eriksson and M. Laine JCAP06(2024)016
We estimate the equilibration rate of a nearly homogeneous Higgs field, displaced from its ground state during the onset of an electroweak phase transition. The computation is carried out with Hard Thermal Loop resummed perturbation theory, and a significant part of the result originates from Bose-enhanced t-channel 2 ↔ 2 scatterings. The expression is shown to be IR finite and gauge independent. Possible applications to Langevin simulations of bubble nucleation are mentioned, and we also contrast with the friction affecting bubble growth.
Cynthia Trendafilova et al JCAP06(2024)017
The delensing of cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps will be increasingly valuable for extracting as much information as possible from future CMB surveys. Delensing provides many general benefits, including sharpening of the acoustic peaks, more accurate recovery of the damping tail, and reduction of lensing-induced B-mode power. In this paper we present several applications of delensing focused on testing theories of early-universe inflation with observations of the CMB. We find that delensing the CMB results in improved parameter constraints for reconstructing the spectrum of primordial curvature fluctuations, probing oscillatory features in the primordial curvature spectrum, measuring the spatial curvature of the universe, and constraining several different models of isocurvature perturbations. In some cases we find that delensing can recover almost all of the constraining power contained in unlensed spectra, and it will be a particularly valuable analysis technique to achieve further improvements in constraints for model parameters whose measurements are not expected to improve significantly when utilizing only lensed CMB maps from next-generation CMB surveys. We also quantify the prospects of testing the single-field inflation tensor consistency condition using delensed CMB data; we find it to be out of reach of current and proposed experimental technology and advocate for alternative detection methods.
A. Carones and M. Remazeilles JCAP06(2024)018
Upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, aimed at measuring primordial CMB polarization B-modes, require exquisite control of instrumental systematics and Galactic foreground contamination. Blind minimum-variance techniques, like the Needlet Internal Linear Combination (NILC), have proven effective in reconstructing the CMB polarization signal and mitigating foregrounds and systematics across diverse sky models without suffering from foreground mismodelling errors. Still, residual foreground contamination from NILC may bias the recovered CMB polarization at large angular scales when confronted with the most complex foreground scenarios. By adding constraints to NILC to deproject statistical moments of the Galactic emission, the Constrained Moment ILC (cMILC) method has been demonstrated to further enhance foreground subtraction, albeit with an associated increase in overall noise variance. Faced with this trade-off between foreground bias reduction and overall variance minimization, there is still no recipe on which moments to deproject and which are better suited for blind variance minimization. To address this, we introduce the optimized cMILC (ocMILC) pipeline, which performs full automated optimization of the required number and set of foreground moments to deproject, pivot parameter values, and deprojection coefficients across the sky and angular scales, depending on the actual sky complexity, available frequency coverage, and experiment sensitivity. The optimal number of moments for deprojection, before paying significant noise penalty, is determined through a data diagnosis inspired by the Generalized NILC (GNILC) method. Validated on B-mode simulations of the PICO space mission concept with four challenging foreground models, ocMILC exhibits lower Galactic foreground contamination compared to NILC and cMILC at all angular scales, with limited noise penalty. This multi-layer optimization enables the ocMILC pipeline to achieve unbiased posteriors of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, regardless of foreground complexity.
Mohit Panwar and Pankaj Jain JCAP06(2024)019
We study the dipole signal in the slope x of the log N–log S relationship for quasars using the CatWISE2020 catalog of infrared sources. Here N is the number of sources with flux density greater than S. The slope is extracted by using a maximized log-likelihood method as well as Bayesian analysis. We obtain the value x = 1.579 ± 0.001 for a quasar sample of 1355352 sources. We extract the dipole signal in this parameter by employing χ2 minimization, assuming a sky model of x up to the quadrupole term. We find that the dipole amplitude |D| is 0.005 ± 0.002 and dipole direction (l, b) in Galactic coordinate system equal to (201.50° ± 27.87°, -29.37° ± 19.86°). The direction of dipole anisotropy is found to be very close to the hemispherical power asymmetry (l, b)=(221°,-27°) in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The dipole signal is also extracted using Bayesian analysis and found to be in good agreement with that obtained using χ2 minimization. We also obtain a signal of quadrupole anisotropy which is found to be correlated with the ecliptic poles and can be attributed to ecliptic bias.
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Ricardo Z. Ferreira et al JCAP06(2024)020
Unstable domain wall (DW) networks in the early universe are cosmologically viable and can emit a large amount of gravitational waves (GW) before annihilating. As such, they provide an interpretation for the recent signal reported by Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) collaborations. A related important question is whether such a scenario also leads to significant production of Primordial Black Holes (PBH). We investigate both GW and PBH production using 3D numerical simulations in an expanding background, with box sizes up to N = 3240, including the annihilation phase. We find that: i) the network decays exponentially, i.e. the false vacuum volume drops as ∼ exp(-η3), with η the conformal time; ii) the GW spectrum is larger than traditional estimates by more than one order of magnitude, due to a delay between DW annihilation and the sourcing of GWs. We then present a novel semi-analytical method to estimate the PBH abundances: rare false vacuum pockets of super-Hubble size collapse to PBHs if their energy density becomes comparable to the background when they cross the Hubble scale. Smaller (but more abundant) pockets will instead collapse only if they are close to spherical. This introduces very large uncertainties in the final PBH abundance. The first phenomenological implication is that the DW interpretation of the PTA signal is compatible with observational constraints on PBHs, within the uncertainties. Second, in a different parameter region, the dark matter can be entirely in the form of asteroid-mass PBHs from the DW collapse. Remarkably, this would also lead to a GW background in the observable range of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA and future interferometers, such as LISA and Einstein Telescope.
M. Eriksson and M. Laine JCAP06(2024)016
We estimate the equilibration rate of a nearly homogeneous Higgs field, displaced from its ground state during the onset of an electroweak phase transition. The computation is carried out with Hard Thermal Loop resummed perturbation theory, and a significant part of the result originates from Bose-enhanced t-channel 2 ↔ 2 scatterings. The expression is shown to be IR finite and gauge independent. Possible applications to Langevin simulations of bubble nucleation are mentioned, and we also contrast with the friction affecting bubble growth.
Cynthia Trendafilova et al JCAP06(2024)017
The delensing of cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps will be increasingly valuable for extracting as much information as possible from future CMB surveys. Delensing provides many general benefits, including sharpening of the acoustic peaks, more accurate recovery of the damping tail, and reduction of lensing-induced B-mode power. In this paper we present several applications of delensing focused on testing theories of early-universe inflation with observations of the CMB. We find that delensing the CMB results in improved parameter constraints for reconstructing the spectrum of primordial curvature fluctuations, probing oscillatory features in the primordial curvature spectrum, measuring the spatial curvature of the universe, and constraining several different models of isocurvature perturbations. In some cases we find that delensing can recover almost all of the constraining power contained in unlensed spectra, and it will be a particularly valuable analysis technique to achieve further improvements in constraints for model parameters whose measurements are not expected to improve significantly when utilizing only lensed CMB maps from next-generation CMB surveys. We also quantify the prospects of testing the single-field inflation tensor consistency condition using delensed CMB data; we find it to be out of reach of current and proposed experimental technology and advocate for alternative detection methods.
A. Carones and M. Remazeilles JCAP06(2024)018
Upcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, aimed at measuring primordial CMB polarization B-modes, require exquisite control of instrumental systematics and Galactic foreground contamination. Blind minimum-variance techniques, like the Needlet Internal Linear Combination (NILC), have proven effective in reconstructing the CMB polarization signal and mitigating foregrounds and systematics across diverse sky models without suffering from foreground mismodelling errors. Still, residual foreground contamination from NILC may bias the recovered CMB polarization at large angular scales when confronted with the most complex foreground scenarios. By adding constraints to NILC to deproject statistical moments of the Galactic emission, the Constrained Moment ILC (cMILC) method has been demonstrated to further enhance foreground subtraction, albeit with an associated increase in overall noise variance. Faced with this trade-off between foreground bias reduction and overall variance minimization, there is still no recipe on which moments to deproject and which are better suited for blind variance minimization. To address this, we introduce the optimized cMILC (ocMILC) pipeline, which performs full automated optimization of the required number and set of foreground moments to deproject, pivot parameter values, and deprojection coefficients across the sky and angular scales, depending on the actual sky complexity, available frequency coverage, and experiment sensitivity. The optimal number of moments for deprojection, before paying significant noise penalty, is determined through a data diagnosis inspired by the Generalized NILC (GNILC) method. Validated on B-mode simulations of the PICO space mission concept with four challenging foreground models, ocMILC exhibits lower Galactic foreground contamination compared to NILC and cMILC at all angular scales, with limited noise penalty. This multi-layer optimization enables the ocMILC pipeline to achieve unbiased posteriors of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, regardless of foreground complexity.
Giorgio Laverda and Javier Rubio JCAP06(2024)E01
We rectify an erroneous rescaling factor that affects the last coefficient of the parametric formulas in equations (2.28), (2.29) and (2.34). New figures are included in order to correct for the mismatch. For a smoother read, we refer the reader to the updated arXiv version of this work arXiv:2307.03774.
Giulia Piccirilli et al JCAP06(2024)012
We make use of the Gaia-unWISE quasar catalogue, Quaia, to constrain the growth history out to high redshifts from the clustering of quasars and their cross-correlation with maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) lensing convergence. Considering three tomographic bins, centred at redshifts z̅i = [0.69, 1.59, 2.72], we reconstruct the evolution of the amplitude of matter fluctuations σ8(z) over the last ∼ 12 billion years of cosmic history. In particular, we make one of the highest-redshift measurements of σ8 (σ8(z = 2.72) = 0.22 ± 0.06), finding it to be in good agreement (at the ∼ 1σ level) with the value predicted by ΛCDM using CMB data from Planck. We also used the data to study the evolution of the linear quasar bias for this sample, finding values similar to those of other quasar samples, although with a less steep evolution at high redshifts. Finally, we study the potential impact of foreground contamination in the CMB lensing maps and, although we find evidence of contamination in cross-correlations at z ∼ 1.7 we are not able to clearly pinpoint its origin as being Galactic or extragalactic. Nevertheless, we determine that the impact of this contamination on our results is negligible.
Marcos A.G. Garcia et al JCAP06(2024)014
We explore various aspects concerning the role of vector bosons during the reheating process. Generally, reheating occurs during the period of oscillations of the inflaton condensate and the evolution of the radiation bath depends on the inflaton equation of state. For oscillations about a quadratic minimum, the equation of state parameter, w = p/ρ = 0, and the evolution of the temperature, T(a) with respect to the scale factor is independent of the spin of the inflaton decay products. However, for cases when w > 0, there is a dependence on the spin, and here we consider the evolution when the inflaton decays or scatters to vector bosons. We also investigate the gravitational production of vector bosons as potential dark matter candidates. Gravitational production predominantly occurs through the longitudinal mode. We compare these results to the gravitational production of scalars.
J. Krywonos et al JCAP06(2024)015
When fitting cosmological models to data, a Bayesian framework is commonly used, requiring assumptions on the form of the likelihood and model prior. In light of current tensions between different data, it is interesting to investigate the robustness of cosmological measurements to statistical assumptions about the likelihood distribution from which the data was drawn. We consider the impact of changes to the likelihood caused by uncertainties due to the finite number of mock catalogs used to estimate the covariance matrix, leading to the replacement of the standard Gaussian likelihood with a multivariate t-distribution. These changes to the likelihood have a negligible impact on recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) lensing and baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) measurements, for which covariance matrices were measured from mock catalogs. We then extend our analysis to perform a sensitivity test on the Gaussian likelihoods typically adopted, considering how increasing the size of the tails of the likelihood (again using a t-distribution) affects cosmological inferences. For an open ΛCDM model constrained by BAO alone, we find that increasing the weight in the tails shifts and broadens the resulting posterior on the parameters, with a ∼0.2–0.4σ effect on ΩΛ and Ωk. In contrast, the CMB temperature and polarization constraints in ΛCDM showed less than 0.03σ changes in the parameters, except for {τ, ln(1010As), σ8, S8, σ8Ω0.25m, zre, 109Ase-2τ} which shifted by around 0.1–0.2σ. If we use solely ℓ < 30 data, the amplitude Ase-2τ varies in the posterior mean by 0.7σ and the error bars increase by 6%. We conclude, at least for current-generation CMB and BAO measurements, that uncertainties in the shape and tails of the likelihood do not contribute to current tensions.
Enrique Gaztañaga and K. Sravan Kumar JCAP06(2024)001
In this paper, we present compelling evidence for the parity asymmetry (a discrete symmetry separate from isotropy) in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) map, measured through two-point temperature correlations. Any asymmetry associated with discrete symmetries, such as parity, challenges our understanding of quantum physics associated with primordial physics rather than LCDM (Λ Cold-Dark-Matter) itself. We commence by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the Planck CMB, focusing on the distribution of power in low-multipoles and temperature anticorrelations at parity conjugate points in position space. We find tension with the near scale-invariant power-law power spectrum of Standard Inflation (SI), with p-values of the order (10-4 - 10-3). Alternatively, we explore the framework of direct-sum inflation (DSI), where a quantum fluctuation arises as a direct sum of two components evolving forward and backward in time at parity conjugate points in physical space. This mechanism results in a parity-asymmetric scale-dependent power spectrum, particularly prominent at low-multipoles, without any additional free model parameters. Our findings indicate that DSI is consistent with data on parity asymmetry, the absence of power at θ > 60°, and power suppression at low-even-multipoles which are major data anomalies in the SI model. Furthermore, we discover that the parameters characterizing the hemispherical power asymmetry anomaly become statistically insignificant when the large SI quadrupole amplitude is reduced to align with the data. DSI explains this low quadrupole with a p-value of 3.5%, 39 times higher than SI. Combining statistics from parameters measuring parity and low-ℓ angular power spectrum, we find that DSI is 50-650 times more probable than SI. In summary, our investigation suggests that while CMB temperature fluctuations exhibit homogeneity and isotropy, they also display parity-asymmetric behavior consistent with predictions of DSI. This observation provides a tantalizing evidence for the quantum mechanical nature of gravity.
Ogan Özsoy and Gianmassimo Tasinato JCAP06(2024)003
We propose a cosmological dark matter production mechanism in the form of a longitudinal massive vector boson. We build upon the work [1] including non-minimal couplings of the massive vector with gravity, developing a well motivated set-up from an effective field theory perspective. We carefully track the dynamics of vector field in passing from inflation to radiation dominated universe to show that the late time abundance of longitudinal modes — excited initially by the quantum fluctuations during inflation — can provide the observed dark matter abundance for sufficiently weak non-minimal coupling and wide range of vector masses 5 × 10-7 ≲ m [eV] ≲ 5 × 103. The final abundance of dark matter depends on two parameter, the vector mass and its non-minimal coupling with gravity. We discuss experimental venues to probe this framework, including the production of a stochastic gravitational wave background. The latter is especially interesting, as the same mechanism that generates dark matter can potentially lead to the production of gravitational waves in the LISA frequency band, through the second-order effects of large dark matter iso-curvature perturbations at small scales. We take a first step in this direction, identifying the potential information that gravitational wave experiments can provide on the parameter space of dark matter within this scenario.