Cosmological Fluctuations Research Articles

Reconstruction of Cosmological Initial Density Field with Observations from the Epoch of Reionization

The initial density distribution provides a basis for understanding the complete evolution of cosmological density fluctuations. While reconstruction in our local Universe exploits the observations of galaxy surveys with large volumes, observations of high-redshift galaxies are performed with a small field of view and therefore can hardly be used for reconstruction. Here, we propose reconstructing the initial density field using the H i 21 cm and CO line intensity maps from the epoch of reionization. Observations of these two intensity maps provide complementary information on the density field—the H i 21 cm field is a proxy of matter distributions in the neutral regions, while the CO line intensity maps are sensitive to the high-density, star-forming regions that host the sources for reionization. Technically, we employ the conjugate gradient method and develop the machinery for minimizing the cost function for the intensity mapping observations. Analytical expressions for the gradient of cost function are derived explicitly. We show that the resimulated intensity maps match the input maps of mock observations using semi-numerical simulations of reionization with an rms error ≲7% at all stages of reionization. This reconstruction is also robust with an rms error of ∼10% when an optimistic level of shot noise is applied to the CO map or white noise at the level of ≲10% of the standard deviation is applied to each map. Our proof-of-concept work demonstrates the robustness of the reconstruction method, thereby providing an effective technique for reconstructing the cosmological initial density distribution from high-redshift observations.

Primordial Black hole formation from overlapping cosmological fluctuations

We consider the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs), during the radiation-dominated Universe, generated from the collapse of super-horizon curvature fluctuations that are overlapped with others on larger scales. Using a set of different curvature profiles, we show that the threshold for PBH formation (defined as the critical peak of the compaction function) can be decreased by several percentages, thanks to the overlapping between two peaks in the profile of the compaction function. In the opposite case, when the fluctuations are sufficiently decoupled the threshold values behave as having the fluctuations isolated (isolated peaks). We find that the analytical estimates of ref. [1] can be used accurately when applied to the corresponding peak that is leading to the gravitational collapse. We also study in detail the dynamics and estimate the final PBH mass for different initial configurations, showing that the profile dependence has a significant effect on that.

Back-reaction of long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations as measured by a clock field

We consider the back-reaction of cosmological fluctuations on the local expansion rate averaged over a space-like hypersurface of constant value of a clock field. We show that in the infrared limit, the fluctuations lead to a decrease in the average expansion rate, measured at a fixed value of the clock field, compared to what would be obtained in a homogeneous universe. We work in the context of Einstein gravity coupled to perfect fluid matter.

Influence phase of a dS observer. Part I. Scalar exchange

Inspired by real-time computations in AdS black holes, we propose a method to obtain the influence phase of a cosmological observer by calculating the on-shell action on a doubled spacetime geometry. The influence phase is the effective action for an open system: for a dS static patch observer coupled to a scalar field it incorporates the radiation reaction due to the bulk fields and their dS Hawking radiation. For a general extended source in dS, we describe how to account for finite size effects. In the long-time limit, we get a Markovian open quantum system susceptible to cosmological fluctuations, whereas the short-time limit reproduces the worldline theory of flat-space radiation reaction. We also present a fully covariantised form for the cubic corrections to the radiation reaction in even spacetime dimensions, including Hubble contributions, and find an intriguing recursive structure across dimensions.

Spatial curvature from super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations

Spatial curvature from super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations

Minimal decoherence from inflation

We compute the rate with which super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations are decohered during inflation, by their gravitational interactions with unobserved shorter-wavelength scalar and tensor modes. We do so using Open Effective Field Theory methods, that remain under control at the late times of observational interest, contrary to perturbative calculations. Our result is minimal in the sense that it only incorporates the self-interactions predicted by General Relativity in single-clock models (additional interaction channels should only speed up decoherence). We find that decoherence is both suppressed by the first slow-roll parameter and by the energy density during inflation in Planckian units, but that it is enhanced by the volume comprised within the scale of interest, in Hubble units. This implies that, for the scales probed in the Cosmic Microwave Background, decoherence is effective as soon as inflation proceeds above ∼ 5 × 109 GeV. Alternatively, if inflation proceeds at GUT scale decoherence is incomplete only for the scales crossing out the Hubble radius in the last ∼ 13 e-folds of inflation. We also compute how short-wavelength scalar modes decohere primordial tensor perturbations, finding a faster rate unsuppressed by slow-roll parameters. Identifying the parametric dependence of decoherence, and the rate at which it proceeds, helps suggest ways to look for quantum effects.

Cosmological Fluctuations in Delta Gravity

About 70% of the Universe is Dark Energy, but the physics community still does not know what it is. Delta gravity (DG) is an alternative theory of gravitation that could solve this cosmological problem. Previously, we studied the Universe’s accelerated expansion, where DG was able to explain the SNe-Ia data successfully. In this work, we computed the cosmological fluctuations in DG that give rise to the CMB through a hydrodynamic approximation. We calculated the gauge transformations for the metric and the perfect fluid to present the equations of the evolution of cosmological fluctuations. This provided the necessary equations to solve the scalar TT power spectrum in a semi-analytical way. These equations are useful for comparing the DG theory with astronomical observations and thus being able to constrain the DG cosmology.

Shapes of non-Gaussianity in warm inflation

Sphaleron heating has been recently proposed as a mechanism to realize warm inflation when inflaton is an axion coupled to pure Yang-Mills. As a result of heating, there is a friction coefficient γ ∝ T 3 in the equation of motion for the inflaton, and a thermal contribution to cosmological fluctuations. Without the knowledge of the inflaton potential, non-Gaussianity is the most promising way of searching for the signatures of this model. Building on an earlier work by Bastero-Gil, Berera, Moss and Ramos, we compute the scalar three-point correlation function and point out some distinct features in the squeezed and folded limits. As a detection strategy, we show that the combination of the equilateral template and one new template has a large overlap with the shape of non-Gaussianity over the range 0.01 ≤ γ/H ≤ 1000, and in this range 0.7 < |f NL| < 50.

Primordial black holes from stochastic tunnelling

If the inflaton gets trapped in a local minimum of its potential shortly before the end of inflation, it escapes by building up quantum fluctuations in a process known as stochastic tunnelling. In this work we study cosmological fluctuations produced in such a scenario, and how likely they are to form Primordial Black Holes (PBHs). This is done by using the stochastic-δ N formalism, which allows us to reconstruct the highly non-Gaussian tails of the distribution function of the number of e-folds spent in the false-vacuum state. We explore two different toy models, both analytically and numerically, in order to identify which properties do or do not depend on the details of the false-vacuum profile. We find that when the potential barrier is small enough compared to its width, ΔV/V < Δϕ 2/M Pl 2, the potential can be approximated as being flat between its two local extrema, so results previously obtained in a “flat quantum well” apply.Otherwise, when Δ V/V < V/M Pl 4, the PBH abundance depends exponentially on the height of the potential barrier, and when Δ V/V > V/M Pl it depends super-exponentially (i.e. as the exponential of an exponential) on the barrier height. In that later case PBHs are massively produced.This allows us to quantify how much flat inflection points need to be fine-tuned.In a deep false vacuum, we also find that slow-roll violations are typically encountered unless the potential is close to linear. This motivates further investigations to generalise our approach to non–slow-roll setups.

Numerical simulations of stochastic inflation using importance sampling

We show how importance sampling can be used to reconstruct the statistics of rare cosmological fluctuations in stochastic inflation. We have developed a publicly available package, PyFPT,[https://github.com/Jacks0nJ/PyFPT.] that solves the first-passage time problem of generic one-dimensional Langevin processes. In the stochastic-δ N formalism, these are related to the curvature perturbation at the end of inflation. We apply this method to quadratic inflation, where the existence of semi-analytical results allows us to benchmark our approach. We find excellent agreement within the estimated statistical error, both in the drift- and diffusion-dominated regimes. The computation takes at most a few hours on a single CPU, and can reach probability values corresponding to less than one Hubble patch per observable universe at the end of inflation. With direct sampling, this would take more than the age of the universe to simulate even with the best current supercomputers. As an application, we study how the presence of large-field boundaries might affect the tail of the probability distribution. We also find that non-perturbative deviations from Gaussianity are not always of the simple exponential type.

Emergent metric space-time from matrix theory

The IKKT matrix model yields an emergent space-time. We further develop these ideas and give a proposal for an emergent metric. Based on previous numerical studies of this model, we provide evidence that the emergent space-time is continuous and infinite in extent, both in space and in time, and that the metric is spatially flat. The time evolution describes the transition from a string-theoretic emergent phase to a phase in which the SO(9) symmetry of the model is spontaneously broken to SO(6) × SO(3), with three dimensions of space expanding, becoming classical and at later times evolving like in a radiation-dominated universe, and the remaining six dimensions of space stabilized at the string scale. We speculate on how this analysis can be extended to yield an early universe cosmology which, in addition to the above-mentioned properties, also leads to a roughly scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological fluctuations and gravitational waves.

Galaxy Phase-Space Density Data Preclude That Bose–Einstein Condensate Be the Total Dark Matter

Ultralight scalars with a typical mass of the order m∼10−22 eV and light scalars forming a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) exhibit a Jeans length in the kpc scale and were therefore proposed as dark matter (DM) candidates. Our treatment here is generic, independent of the particle physics model and applies to all DM BEC, in both in or out of equilibrium situations. Two observed quantities crucially constrain DM in an inescapable way: the average DM density ρDM and the phase-space density Q. The observed values of ρDM and Q in galaxies today constrain both the possibility to form a BEC, and the DM mass m. These two constraints robustly exclude the axion DM that decouples after inflation. Moreover, the value m∼10−22 eV can only be obtained with a number of ultrarelativistic degrees of freedom at decoupling in the trillions, which is impossible for decoupling in the radiation dominated era. In addition, we find for the axion vacuum misalignment scenario that axions are produced strongly out of thermal equilibrium and that the axion mass in such a scenario turns to be 17 orders of magnitude too large to reproduce the observed galactic structures. Moreover, we also consider inhomogenous gravitationally bounded BEC’s supported by the bosonic quantum pressure independently of any particular particle physics scenario. For a typical size R∼ kpc and compact object masses M∼107M⊙ they remarkably lead to the same particle mass m∼10−22 eV as the BEC free-streaming length. However, the phase-space density for the gravitationally bounded BEC’s turns out to be more than sixty orders of magnitude smaller than the galaxy-observed values. We conclude that the BEC cannot be the total DM. The axion can be candidates to be only part of the DM of the universe. Besides, an axion in the mili-eV scale may be a relevant source of dark energy through the zero point cosmological quantum fluctuations.

CFTs blueshift tensor fluctuations universally

The strong constraints of conformal symmetry cause any nearly-conformal sector to blueshift tensor fluctuations in cosmology. Hidden sectors with approximate conformal symmetry, which may be quite large, are a well-motivated extension of physics beyond the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology. They can therefore lead to a detectable shift in the tensor tilt for next-generation CMB and gravitational wave experiments. We compute the leading-order contribution to the in-in graviton two-point function from virtual loops in such sectors to demonstrate this universal effect. In units where a single conformally-coupled scalar is 1, limits from Stage-IV CMB experiments could bound the size of this extra sector to be smaller than ∼1015, under a plausible calculational assumption backed by a simple power counting argument. This would be sufficient to rule out N-Naturalness as a complete resolution of the hierarchy problem.

Real-space Bell inequalities in de Sitter

Bell-inequality violations reveal the presence of quantum correlations between two particles that have interacted and then separated. Their generalisation to quantum fields is necessary to study a number of field-theoretic setups, such as cosmological density fluctuations. In this work, we show how Bell operators can be constructed for quantum fields in real space, and for Gaussian states we compute their expectation value in terms of the field power spectra. We then apply our formalism to a scalar field in de-Sitter space-time. We find that, in spite of the tremendous production of entangled particles with opposite wave momenta on large scales, Bell inequalities are not violated in real space. The reason is that, when considering measurements of a field at two distinct locations in real space, one implicitly traces over the configuration of the field at every other location, leading to a mixed bipartite system. This “effective decoherence” effect is responsible for the erasure of quantum features, and casts some doubts on our ability to reveal the quantum origin of cosmological structures. We finally discuss these results in the light of quantum discord.

H2 Cooling and Gravitational Collapse of Supersonically Induced Gas Objects

Abstract We study the formation and gravitational collapse of supersonically induced gas objects (SIGOs) in the early universe. We run cosmological hydrodynamics simulations of SIGOs, including relative streaming motions between baryons and dark matter. Our simulations also follow nonequilibrium chemistry and molecular hydrogen cooling in primordial gas clouds. A number of SIGOs are formed in the run with fast-streaming motions of 2 times the rms of the cosmological velocity fluctuations. We identify a particular gas cloud that condensates by H2 cooling without being hosted by a dark matter halo. The SIGO remains outside the virial radius of its closest halo, and it becomes Jeans unstable when the central gas-particle density reaches ∼100 cm−3 with a temperature of ∼200 K. The corresponding Jeans mass is ∼105 M ⊙, and thus the formation of primordial stars or a star cluster is expected in the SIGO.

Stochastic inflation from quantum field theory and the parametric dependence of the effective noise amplitude

The non-linear dynamics of long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations may be phrased in terms of an effective classical, but stochastic evolution equation. The stochastic noise represents short-wavelength modes that continually redshift into the long-wavelength domain. The effective evolution may be derived from first principles quantum field theory in an expanding background, through a sequence of approximations calling for additional scrutiny. We perform such an analysis, putting particular emphasis on the amplitude of the stochastic noise, which ultimately determines the cosmological correlations and provides a non-perturbative IR regulator to the dynamics.

Quantum Fluctuations in the Effective Relational GFT Cosmology

We analyze the size and evolution of quantum fluctuations of cosmologically relevant geometric observables, in the context of the effective relational cosmological dynamics of GFT models of quantum gravity. We consider the fluctuations of the matter clock observables, to test the validity of the relational evolution picture itself. Next, we compute quantum fluctuations of the universe volume and of other operators characterizing its evolution (number operator for the fundamental GFT quanta, effective Hamiltonian and scalar field momentum). In particular, we focus on the late (clock) time regime, where the dynamics is compatible with a flat FRW universe, and on the very early phase near the quantum bounce produced by the fundamental quantum gravity dynamics.

Constraining the spectrum of cosmological perturbations from statistical thermal fluctuations

In the standard inflationary paradigm, the seeds for cosmic structures are assumed to be of quantum origin. During inflation, the quantum fluctuations of the fields are stretched by the cosmic expansion to macroscopic sizes and become classical, then growing through gravitational collapse to eventually form the structures we observe today. Thermal fluctuations introduce another possible origin for small inhomogeneities. In the early universe the temperatures could be very high, and there are several important cosmological models where thermal fluctuations could be the main ingredient responsible for seeding the inhomogeneities. In this work it is suggested a general phenomenological parametrization for a class of early universe models described by an effective equation of state which is a function of the Hubble parameter. In such models, the main seeds of cosmological fluctuation are thermal fluctuations that can appear even at classical level. The proposed effective equation of state leads to a description of the universe which have the advantage of avoiding the initial singularity problem and also the problems associated with reheating, providing a smooth transition from an era with weff∼−1 to an era with w=1/3. Motivated by the formalism previously developed in the literature to compute the spectrum from thermal fluctuations [1], we compute for this class of models, the power spectrum of scalar and tensor perturbations, in addition to non-gaussianity parameters, which allows us to constraint the free parameters of this class of models with the observational results.

Cosmological fluctuations on the light cone

In studying temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background Weinberg has noted that some ease of calculation and insight can be achieved by looking at the structure of the perturbed light cone on which the perturbed photons propagate. In his approach Weinberg worked in a specific gauge and specialized to fluctuations around the standard Robertson-Walker cosmological model with vanishing spatial three-curvature. In this paper we generalize this analysis by providing a gauge invariant treatment in which no choice of gauge is made, and by considering geometries with non-vanishing spatial three-curvature. By using the scalar, vector, tensor fluctuation basis we find that the relevant gauge invariant combinations that appear in the light cone temperature fluctuations have no explicit dependence on the spatial curvature even if the spatial curvature of the background geometry is nonvanishing. We find that a not previously considered, albeit not too consequential, temperature fluctuation at the observer has to be included in order to enforce gauge invariance. As well as working with comoving time we also work with conformal time in which a background metric of any given spatial three-curvature can be written as a time-dependent conformal factor (the comoving time expansion radius as written in conformal time) times a static Robertson-Walker geometry of the same spatial three-curvature. For temperature fluctuations on the light cone this conformal factor drops out identically. Thus the gauge invariant combinations that appear in the photon temperature fluctuations have no explicit dependence on either the conformal factor or the spatial three-curvature at all.

The Cosmological OTOC: A New Proposal for Quantifying Auto-Correlated Random Non-Chaotic Primordial Fluctuations

The underlying physical concept of computing out-of-time-ordered correlation (OTOC) is a significant new tool within the framework of quantum field theory, which now-a-days is treated as a measure of random fluctuations. In this paper, by following the canonical quantization technique, we demonstrate a computational method to quantify the two different types of cosmological auto-correlated OTO functions during the epoch when the non-equilibrium features dominates in primordial cosmology. In this formulation, two distinct dynamical time scales are involved to define the quantum mechanical operators arising from the cosmological perturbation scenario. We have provided detailed explanation regarding the necessity of this new formalism to quantify any random events generated from quantum fluctuations in primordial cosmology. We have performed an elaborative computation for the two types of two-point and four-point auto-correlated OTO functions in terms of the cosmological perturbation field variables and its canonically conjugate momenta to quantify random auto-correlations in the non-equilibrium regime. For both of the cases, we found significantly distinguishable non-chaotic, but random, behaviour in the OTO auto-correlations, which was not pointed out before in this type of study. Finally, we have also demonstrated the classical limiting behaviour of the mentioned two types of auto-correlated OTOC functions from the thermally weighted phase-space averaged Poisson brackets, which we found to exactly match the large time limiting behaviour of the auto-correlations in the super-horizon regime of the cosmological scalar mode fluctuation.