Quasi-dust ekpyrotic scenario in loop quantum cosmology

We investigate the bounce realization in the framework of DHOST cosmology, focusing on the relation with observables. We perform a detailed analysis of the scalar and tensor perturbations during the Ekpyrotic contraction phase, the bounce phase, and the fast-roll expansion phase, calculating the power spectra, the spectral indices and the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Furthermore, we study the initial conditions, incorporating perturbations generated by Ekpyrotic vacuum fluctuations, by matter vacuum fluctuations, and by thermal fluctuations. The scale invariance of the scalar power spectrum can be acquired introducing a matter contraction phase before the Ekpyrotic phase, or invoking a thermal gas as the source. The DHOST bounce scenario with cosmological perturbations generated by thermal fluctuations proves to be the most efficient one, and the corresponding predictions are in perfect agreement with observational bounds. Especially the tensor-to-scalar ratio is many orders of magnitude within the allowed region, since it is suppressed by the Hubble parameter at the beginning of the bounce phase.

The effect of the length of inflation on the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations is estimated using the power-law inflation model with a scale factor of a(η) = (−η)p = tq. Considering various pre-inflation models with radiation-dominated or scalar matter-dominated periods before inflation in combination with two matching conditions, the temperature angular power spectrum (TT) and temperature–polarization cross-power spectrum (TE) are calculated and a likelihood analysis is performed. It is shown that the discrepancies between the Wilkinson microwave anisotropy probe (WMAP) data and the ΛCDM model, such as suppression of the spectrum at l = 2, 3 and oscillatory behaviour, may be explained by the finite length of inflation model if the length of inflation is near 60 e-folds and q ⩾ 300. The proposed models retain similar values of χ2 to that achieved by the ΛCDM model with respect to fit to the WMAP data, but display different characteristics of the angular TE power spectra at l ⩽ 20.

We examine power spectra from the Abell/ACO rich cluster survey and the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey (2dfGRS) for observational evidence of features produced by the baryons. A non-negligible baryon fraction produces relatively sharp oscillatory features at specific wavenumbers in the matter power spectrum. However, the mere existence of baryons will also produce a global suppression of the power spectrum. We look for both of these features using the false discovery rate (FDR) statistic. We show that the window effects on the Abell/ACO power spectrum are minimal, which has allowed for the discovery of discrete oscillatory features in the power spectrum. On the other hand, there are no statistically significant oscillatory features in the 2dFGRS power spectrum, which is expected from the survey's broad window function. After accounting for window effects, we apply a scale-independent bias to the 2dFGRS power spectrum, P_{Abell}(k) = b^2P_{2dF}(k) and b = 3.2. We find that the overall shapes of the Abell/ACO and the biased 2dFGRS power spectra are entirely consistent over the range 0.02 <= k <= 0.15hMpc^-1. We examine the range of Omega_{matter} and baryon fraction for which these surveys could detect significant suppression in power. The reported baryon fractions for both the Abell/ACO and 2dFGRS surveys are high enough to cause a detectable suppression in power (after accounting for errors, windows and k-space sampling). Using the same technique, we also examine, given the best fit baryon density obtained from BBN, whether it is possible to detect additional suppression due to dark matter-baryon interaction. We find that the limit on dark matter cross section/mass derived from these surveys are the same as those ruled out in a recent study by Chen, Hannestad and Scherrer.

Primordial magnetic fields are generated during inflation by considering actions that break the conformal invariance of the electromagnetic field. To break the conformal invariance, the electromagnetic fields are coupled either to the inflaton or to the scalar curvature. Also, a parity violating term is often added to the action in order to enhance the amplitudes of the primordial electromagnetic fields. In this work, we examine the effects of deviations from slow roll inflation on the spectra of nonhelical as well as helical electromagnetic fields. We find that, in the case of the coupling to the scalar curvature, there arise certain challenges in generating electromagnetic fields of the desired shapes and strengths even in slow roll inflation. When the field is coupled to the inflaton, it is possible to construct model-dependent coupling functions that lead to nearly scale invariant magnetic fields in slow roll inflation. However, we show that sharp features in the scalar power spectrum generated due to departures from slow roll inflation inevitably lead to strong features in the power spectra of the electromagnetic fields. Moreover, we find that such effects can also considerably suppress the strengths of the generated electromagnetic fields over the scales of cosmological interest. We illustrate these aspects with the aid of inflationary models that have been considered to produce specific features in the scalar power spectrum. Further, we find that, in such situations, if the strong features in the electromagnetic power spectra are to be undone, the choice of the coupling function requires considerable fine tuning. We discuss wider implications of the results we obtain.

We investigate cosmological scenarios containing one canonical scalar field with an exponential potential in the context of bouncing models, where the bounce happens due to quantum cosmological effects. The only possible bouncing solutions in this scenario (discarding an infinitely fine tuned exception) must have one and only one dark energy phase, either occurring in the contracting era or in the expanding era. Hence,these bounce solutions are necessarily asymmetric. We calculate the spectral indexes and amplitudes of scalar and tensor perturbations numerically, considering the whole history of the model, including the bounce phase itself, without making any approximation or using any matching condition on the perturbations. As the background model is necessarily dust dominated in the far past, the usual adiabatic vacuum initial conditions can be easily imposed in this era. Hence, this is a cosmological model where the presence of dark energy behavior in the Universe does not turn problematic the usual vacuum initial conditions prescription for cosmological perturbation in bouncing models. Scalar and tensor perturbations end up being almost scale invariant, as expected. The background parameters can be adjusted, without fine tunings, to yield the observed amplitude for scalar perturbations, and also for the ratio between tensor and scalar amplitudes, $r = T/S \lesssim 0.1$. The amplification of scalar perturbations over tensor perturbations takes place only around the bounce, due to quantum effects, and it would not occur if General Relativity has remained valid throughout this phase. Hence, this is a bouncing model where a single field induces not only an expanding background dark energy phase, but also produces all observed features of cosmological perturbations of quantum mechanical origin at linear order.

Scalar (density) and tensor (gravity-wave) perturbations provide the basis for the fundamental observable consequences of inflation, including CBR anisotropy and the formation of structure in the Universe. These perturbations are nearly scale invariant (Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum), though a slight deviation from scale invariance (``tilt'') can have significant consequences for both CBR anisotropy and structure formation. In particular, a slightly tilted spectrum of scalar perturbations may improve the agreement of the cold dark matter scenario with the observational data. The amplitude and spectrum of the scalar and tensor perturbations depend upon the shape of the inflationary potential in the small interval where the scalar field responsible for inflation was between about 46 and 54 e-folds before the end of inflation. By expanding the inflationary potential in a Taylor series over this interval we show that the amplitudes of the perturbations and the power-law slopes of their spectra can be expressed in terms of the value of the potential 50 e-folds before the end of inflation, ${\mathrm{V}}_{50}$, its steepness ${\mathrm{x}}_{50}$\ensuremath{\equiv}${\mathrm{m}}_{\mathrm{Pl}}$${\mathrm{V}}_{50}^{\ensuremath{'}}$/${\mathrm{V}}_{50}$, and the rate of change of its steepness, ${\mathrm{x}}_{50}^{\ensuremath{'}}$ (a prime denotes a derivative with respect to the scalar field). In addition, the power-law index of the cosmic-scale factor at this time is ${\mathrm{q}}_{50}$\ensuremath{\equiv}[dlnR/dlnt${]}_{50}$\ensuremath{\simeq}16\ensuremath{\pi}/${\mathrm{x}}_{50}^{2}$. (Formally, our results for the perturbation amplitudes and spectral indices are accurate to lowest order in the deviation from scale invariance.) In general, the deviation from scale invariance is such to enhance fluctuations on large scales, and is only significant for steep potentials, large ${\mathrm{x}}_{50}$, or potentials with rapidly changing steepness, large ${\mathrm{x}}_{50}^{\ensuremath{'}}$. In the latter case, only the spectrum of scalar perturbations is significantly tilted. Steep potentials are characterized by a large tensor-mode contribution to the quadrupole CBR temperature anisotropy, a similar tilt in both scalar and tensor perturbations, and a slower expansion rate, i.e., smaller ${\mathrm{q}}_{50}$. Measurements of the amplitude and tilt of the scalar and tensor perturbations overdetermine ${\mathrm{V}}_{50}$, ${\mathrm{x}}_{50}$, and ${\mathrm{x}}_{50}^{\ensuremath{'}}$, and can in principle be used to infer these quantities as well as for testing the inflationary hypothesis. Our formalism has its limitations; it is not applicable to potentials with unusual features in the region that affects astrophysical scales.

We study the effect of sudden transitions in the effective Planck mass during inflation on primordial power spectra. Specifically, we consider models in which this variation results from the nonminimal coupling of a Brans-Dicke type scalar field. We find that the scalar power spectra develop features at the scales corresponding to those leaving the horizon during the transition. In addition, we observe that the tensor perturbations are largely unaffected, so long as the variation of the Planck mass is below the percent level. Otherwise, the tensor power spectra exhibit damped oscillations over the same scales. Due to significant features in the scalar power spectra, the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ shows variation over the corresponding scales. Thus, by studying the spectra of both scalar and tensor perturbations, one can constrain sudden but small variations of the Planck mass during inflation. We illustrate these effects with a number of benchmark single- and two-field models. In addition, we comment on their implications and the possibility to alleviate the tension between the observations of the tensor-to-scalar ratio performed by the Planck and BICEP2 experiments.

We investigate the decay of metastable de Sitter, Minkowski and anti-de Sitter vacua catalyzed by a black hole and a cloud of strings. We apply the method to the creation of the four dimensional bubble universe in the five dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime recently proposed by Banerjee, Danielsson, Dibitetto, Giri and Schillo [1, 2]. We study the bounce action for the creation and find that the bubble with very small cosmological constant, of order Λ(4)/ {M}_4^4 ∼ 10−120, is favored by the catalysis by assuming appropriate mass scales of the black hole and the cloud of strings to reproduce the present energy densities of matter and radiation in the bubble universe.

The present paper tries to answer the question: Can a de Sitter phase in presence of radiation be a competitor of the standard inflationary paradigm for the early universe? This kind of a de Sitter phase can exist in cosmological models where gravitational particle production takes place. To address the issue the metric perturbations in the de Sitter phase in presence of radiation must be known. The evolution of metric perturbations are explicitly calculated in the paper. It is seen that the evolution of scalar and vector perturbations are considerably different from standard inflationary models. These differences arise due to the particle production mechanism. The scalar perturbation power spectrum grows exponentially at small length scales. However, one cannot uniquely specify the scale at which this exponential growth starts because of the dependence of the power spectrum on the initial perturbation value. The time slice on which the initial perturbation starts is arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the initial time slice is related to the problem of setting the initial condition on the perturbations in the present model. The paper briefly opines on vector and tensor perturbations in the de Sitter space filled with radiation. It is seen that quantization of the perturbation modes in the present model is considerably difficult. One has to modify the present model to provide a consistent scheme of quantization of the perturbation modes.

We systematically derive full-sky formulae for the weak lensing power spectra generated by scalar, vector and tensor perturbations from the total angular momentum (TAM) method. Based on both the geodesic and geodesic deviation equations, we first give the gauge-invariant expressions for the deflection angle and Jacobi map as observables of the CMB lensing and cosmic shear experiments. We then apply the TAM method, originally developed in the theoretical studies of CMB, to a systematic derivation of the angular power spectra. The TAM representation, which characterizes the total angular dependence of the spatial modes projected along a line-of-sight, can carry all the information of the lensing modes generated by scalar, vector, and tensor metric perturbations. This greatly simplifies the calculation, and we present a complete set of the full-sky formulae for angular power spectra in both the E-/B-mode cosmic shear and gradient-/curl-mode lensing potential of deflection angle. Based on the formulae, we give illustrative examples of non-vanishing B-mode cosmic shear and curl-mode of deflection angle in the presence of the vector and tensor perturbations, and explicitly compute the power spectra.

Based on the studies in Type IIB string theory phenomenology, we conjecture that a good fraction of the meta-stable de Sitter vacua in the cosmic stringy landscape tend to have a very small cosmological constant Λ when compared to either the string scale MS or the Planck scale MP , i.e., Λ ≪ MS4 ≪ MP4. These low lying de Sitter vacua tend to be accompanied by very light scalar bosons/axions. Here we illustrate this phenomenon with the bosonic mass spectra in a set of Type IIB string theory flux compactification models. We conjecture that small Λ with light bosons is generic among de Sitter solutions in string theory; that is, the smallness of Λ and the existence of very light bosons (may be even the Higgs boson) are results of the statistical preference for such vacua in the landscape. We also discuss a scalar field ϕ3/ϕ4 model to illustrate how this statistical preference for a small Λ remains when quantum loop corrections are included, thus bypassing the radiative instability problem.

We investigate impacts of long-wavelength gravitational waves (GWs) on nonlinear structure formation by utilizing the tidal separate universe simulations. Based on the equivalence of a long-wavelength GW to a uniform tidal field in a local frame, we provide a way to incorporate a long-wavelength GW into the tidal separate universe simulation as an effective anisotropic expansion. This methodology enables us to study effects of GWs on large-scale structure efficiently. We measure the anisotropic imprint in the local power spectrum from the tidal separate universe simulations with GWs, which corresponds to the scalar-scalar-tensor bispectrum in squeezed limit or the so-called power spectrum response to GWs. We also detect the halo tidal bias induced by GWs from the response of the halo-matter cross-power spectrum to GWs, as well as the linear shape bias (or the linear alignment coefficient) induced by GWs from the one-point function of the halo ellipticity. In contrast to the case of the tidal field induced by scalar perturbations, we discover that the wavenumber dependence of the temporal evolution of GWs naturally causes these biases to be scale-dependent. We also find that this scale dependence is well approximated by the second-order density induced by the coupling between scalar and tensor perturbation. This highlights that the structure formation, especially the process to determine the halo shape, is nonlocal in time. Our findings lay the foundation for predicting the impact of GWs on large-scale structure.

The Classical and Quantum Inflaton: the Precise Inflationary Potential and Quantum Inflaton Decay after WMAP

In Dirac-Born-Infeld inflation, changes in the sound speed that transiently break the slow roll approximation lead to features in the power spectrum. We develop and test the generalized slow roll approximation for calculating such effects and show that it can be extended to treat order unity features. As in slow-roll, model independent constraints on the potential of canonical inflation can be directly reinterpreted in the DBI context through this approximation. In particular, a sharp horizon scale step in the warped brane tension can explain oscillatory features in the WMAP7 CMB power spectrum as well as features in the potential. Differences appear only as a small suppression of power on horizon scales and larger.

The Tianlai project is a radio astronomical experiment dedicated to the study of the nature of dark energy. By observing the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) features in the large scale structure power spectrum through 21cm intensity mapping, i.e. observe the intensity variation of the 21cm line emission of the neutral hydrogen at redshifts 0<z<3 without resolving the individual galaxies which host these neutral hydrogen atoms. The BAO features in the power spectrum can be used as standard ruler for distance measurement, by measuring it at different redshifts, the dark energy equation of state can be determined. In order to achieve high precision, it is necessary to observe large sky area with high precision, and the design of the Tianlai experiment is optimized for this. The full scale experiment requires a compact array with a geometric dimension of (100m) <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , and filled with receiver elements. The Tianlai pathfinder, which is being built in a radio quiet site in Xinjiang, China, consists of 3 cylinders of 15m wide and 40 m long. The project is an international effort with participants from China, France, the USA and Canada.