Radiation Domination Research Articles

Induced gravitational waves in a general cosmological background

Gravitational waves (GWs) are inevitably produced by second-order terms in cosmological perturbation theory. Most notably, the so-called induced (GWs) are a window to the small scales part of the primordial spectrum of fluctuations and a key counterpart to the primordial black hole (PBH) scenario. However, semi-analytical solutions are only known for matter and radiation domination eras. In this paper, we present new analytic integral formulas for the induced GWs on subhorizon scales in a general cosmological background with a constant equation-of-state. We also discuss applications to a peaked primordial scalar power spectrum and the PBH scenario.

Reviving Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models in matter dominated freeze-out

It is quite conceivable that dark matter freeze-out occurred during an early period of matter domination, in which case the evolution and relic abundance differ from standard freeze-out calculations which assume a radiation dominated universe. Here we re-examine the classic models in which dark matter interactions with the Standard Model are mediated via either the Higgs or Z boson in the context of matter dominated freeze-out. We highlight that while these classic models are largely excluded by searches in the radiation dominated case, matter dominated freeze-out can relax these limits and thus revive the Higgs and Z portals. Additionally, we discuss the distinctions between matter dominated freeze-out and decoupling during the transition from matter domination to radiation domination, and we comment on the parameter regimes which lead to non-negligible dark matter production during this transition.

Constraining nonthermal dark matter’s impact on the matter power spectrum

The inclusion of a period of (effective) matter domination following inflation and prior to the onset of radiation domination has interesting and observable consequences for structure growth. During this early matter-dominated era (EMDE), the Universe was dominated by massive particles, or an oscillating scalar field, that decayed into Standard Model particles, thus reheating the Universe. This decay process could also be the primary source of dark matter. In the absence of fine-tuning between the masses of the parent and daughter particles, both dark matter particles and Standard Model particles would be produced with relativistic velocities. We investigate the effects of the nonthermal production of dark matter particles with relativistic velocities on the matter power spectrum by determining the resulting velocity distribution function for the dark matter. We find that the vast majority of dark matter particles produced during the EMDE are still relativistic at reheating, so their free streaming erases the perturbations that grow during the EMDE. The free streaming of the dark matter particles can also prevent the formation of satellite galaxies around the Milky Way and the structures observed in the Lyman-$\alpha$ forest. For a given reheat temperature, these observations put an upper limit on the velocity of the dark matter particles at their creation. For example, for a reheat temperature of 10 MeV, dark matter must be produced with a Lorentz factor $\gamma \lesssim 550$.

Slightly ultra-violet freeze-in a hidden gluonic sector

The dark glueball (DGB) from a hidden Yang-Mills sector is a simple non-WIMP dark matter candidate characterized by very few parameters. However, it suffers from the overdensity problem. To overcome it, in general the dark sector is required to be hierarchically cooler than the visible sector. To naturally generate the desired hierarchy, in this paper we introduce higher dimensional operators coupling the dark gauge field strength tensor to the standard model (SM) Higgs doublets or gauge field strength tensors. By tracking the different phases of the universe from the end of inflation, prethermalization, reheating to the radiation dominance era, we show that these operators can make the DGB be a viable dark matter candidate over a wide mass region, from the sub-GeV to multi-PeV or even beyond. At the same time, these operators open decay channels of DGB to the SM species, and partial of the parameter space could leave hints in the cosmic ray.

Annihilation signatures of hidden sector dark matter within early-forming microhalos

If the dark matter is part of a hidden sector with only very feeble couplings to the Standard Model, the lightest particle in the hidden sector will generically be long-lived and could come to dominate the energy density of the universe prior to the onset of nucleosynthesis. During this early matter-dominated era, density perturbations will grow more quickly than otherwise predicted, leading to a large abundance of sub-earth-mass dark matter microhalos. Since the dark matter does not couple directly to the Standard Model, the minimum halo mass is much smaller than expected for weakly interacting dark matter, and the smallest halos could form during the radiation-dominated era. In this paper, we calculate the evolution of density perturbations within the context of such hidden sector models and use a series of $N$-body simulations to determine the outcome of nonlinear collapse during radiation domination. The resulting microhalos are extremely dense, which leads to very high rates of dark matter annihilation and to large indirect detection signals that resemble those ordinarily predicted for decaying dark matter. We find that the Fermi Collaboration's measurement of the high-latitude gamma-ray background rules out a wide range of parameter space within this class of models. The scenarios that are most difficult to constrain are those that feature a very long early matter-dominated era; if microhalos form prior to the decay of the unstable hidden sector matter, the destruction of these microhalos effectively heats the dark matter, suppressing the later formation of microhalos.

Ultraviolet freeze-in and non-standard cosmologies

A notable feature of UV freeze-in is that the relic density is strongly dependent on the highest temperatures of the thermal bath, and a common assumption is that the relevant “highest temperature” should be the reheating temperature after inflation TRH. However, the temperature of the thermal bath can be significantly higher in certain scenarios, reaching a value denoted Tmax, a fact which is only apparent away from the instantaneous decay approximation. Interestingly, it has been shown that if the operators are of sufficiently high mass dimension then the dark matter abundance can be enhanced by a “boost factor” depending on (Tmax/TRH) relative to naive estimates assuming instantaneous reheating. We highlight here that in non-standard cosmological histories the critical mass dimension of the operator above at which the instantaneous decay approximation breaks down, and the exponent of the boost factor, depend on the equation of state ω prior to reheating. We highlight four examples in which the dark matter abundance receives a significant enhancement in the context of gravitino dark matter, the moduli portal, the Higgs portal, and the spin-2 portal (as might arise in bimetric gravity models). We comment on the transition from kination domination to radiation domination as a motivated example of non-standard cosmologies.

Primordial dark matter halos from fifth forces

We argue that primordial dark matter halos could be generated during radiation domination by long-range attractive forces stronger than gravity. In this paper, we derive the conditions under which these structures could dominate the dark matter content of the Universe while passing microlensing constraints and cosmic microwave background energy injection bounds. The dark matter particles would be clumped in objects in the solar mass range with typical sizes of the order of the solar system. Consequences for direct dark matter searches are important.

Primordial black hole remnants as dark matter produced in thermal, matter, and runaway-quintessence postinflationary scenarios

We investigate the cosmology of mini Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) produced by large density perturbations. The mini PBHs evaporate promptly in the early universe and we assume that a stable remnant is left behind. The PBHs remnants can constitute the entire dark matter of the universe for a wide range of remnant masses. We build inflationary models, in the framework of $\alpha$-attractors utilizing exponential functions, in which the PBHs are produced during matter, radiation and kination domination eras. The advantage of these inflationary models is that the spectral index takes values favorable by the Planck 2018 data. The PBH production from runaway inflaton models has the unique and very attractive feature to automatically reheat the universe. In these models the PBHs are produced during the kination stage and their prompt evaporation efficiently produces the required entropy. Such runaway models are remarkably economic having interesting implications for the early universe cosmology, possibly giving rise to a wCDM late time cosmology as well.

Ability of LIGO and LISA to probe the equation of state of the early Universe

The expansion history of the Universe between the end of inflation and the onset of radiation-domination (RD) is currently unknown. If the equation of state during this period is stiffer than that of radiation, w > 1/3, the gravitational wave (GW) background from inflation acquires a blue-tilt d log ρGW/ d log f = 2(w−1/3)/ (w+1/3) > 0 at frequencies f ≫ fRD corresponding to modes re-entering the horizon during the stiff-domination (SD), where fRD is the frequency today of the horizon scale at the SD-to-RD transition. We characterized in detail the transfer function of the GW energy density spectrum, considering both `instant' and smooth modelings of the SD-to-RD transition. The shape of the spectrum is controlled by w, fRD, and Hinf (the Hubble scale of inflation). We determined the parameter space compatible with a detection of this signal by LIGO and LISA, including possible changes in the number of relativistic degrees of freedom, and the presence of a tensor tilt. Consistency with upper bounds on stochastic GW backgrounds, however, rules out a significant fraction of the observable parameter space. We find that this renders the signal unobservable by Advanced LIGO, in all cases. The GW background remains detectable by LISA, though only in a small island of parameter space, corresponding to scenarios with an equation of state in the range 0.46 ≲ w ≲ 0.56 and a high inflationary scale Hinf ≳ 1013 GeV, but low reheating temperature 1 MeV ≲ TRD ≲ 150 MeV (equivalently, 10−11 Hz ≲ fRD ≲ 3.6⋅10−9 Hz). Implications for early Universe scenarios resting upon an SD epoch are briefly discussed.

On preheating in alpha -attractor models of inflation

We study (p)reheating in alpha -attractor T-models of inflation, taking into account both scalar fields present in these models: the inflaton and the spectator. The two-field model has a negative field-space curvature which, at the end of inflation, may lead to geometrical destabilization of the spectator for small values of alpha {mathop {{}_sim }limits ^{<}} 10^{-3}. We perform the instability (Floquet) analysis of the linear dynamics and fully non-linear lattice computations with our numerical code, which we specifically designed for a class of two-field models with non-canonical kinetic terms. We find that the perturbations of the spectator field are much more unstable than the perturbations of the inflaton field, so the dynamics of the early stages of preheating is dominated by the evolution of the spectator perturbations. As a result, the transition from the inflationary era to radiation domination era is practically instantaneous and much faster than previously found in an effective theory including only the inflaton field.

Some like it hot: R2 heals Higgs inflation, but does not cool it

Strong coupling in Higgs inflation at high energies hinders a joint description of inflation, reheating and low-energy dynamics. The situation may be improved with a proper UV completion of the model. A well-defined self-consistent way is to introduce an R2-term into the action. In this modified model the strong coupling scale returns back to the Planck scale, which justifies the use of the perturbative methods in studies of the model dynamics after inflation. We investigate the reheating of the post-inflationary Universe, which involves two highly anharmonic oscillators strongly interacting with each other: homogeneous Higgs field and scalaron. We observe that in interesting regions of model parameter space these oscillations make longitudinal components of the weak gauge bosons tachyonic, triggering instant preheating at timescales much shorter than the Hubble time. The weak gauge bosons are heavy and decay promptly into light Standard Model particles, ensuring the onset of the radiation domination era right after inflation.

Second-order cosmological perturbations. IV. Produced by scalar-tensor and tensor-tensor couplings during the radiation dominated stage

We continue to study the 2nd-order cosmological perturbations in synchronous coordinates in the framework of the general relativity (GR) during the radiation dominated (RD) stage, and to focus on the scalar-tensor and tensor-tensor couplings. The 1st-order curl velocity and the associated 1st-order vector metric perturbations are assumed to be vanishing. By analytically solving the 2nd-order Einstein equation and the energy-momentum conservation equations, we obtain the 2nd-order formal solutions (in the integral form) of all the metric perturbations, density contrast and velocity; perform the transformation between the synchronous coordinates; and identify the residual gauge modes in the 2nd-order solutions. In addition, we present the 2nd-order gauge transformations of the solutions from synchronous to Poisson coordinates. To apply these formal solutions to concrete cosmological study, one needs to choose proper initial conditions and do several numerical integrals.

Classical and loop quantum cosmology phase space of interacting dark energy and superfluid dark matter

In this paper we study in detail the phase space of a cosmological system consisting of two coupled fluids, namely a dark energy fluid coupled with a superfluid dark matter fluid. The dark matter fluid is assumed to have a superfluid equation of state, hence it is not pressureless and our aim is to find the impact of this non-trivial equation of state on the phase space of the coupled system. We shall use two theoretical contexts, namely that of classical cosmology and that of loop quantum cosmology. In the classical case, we investigated the existence and stability of fixed points, and as we will show, no de Sitter fixed points occur, however matter and radiation domination fixed points occur, which are hyperbolic and unstable. We also show that there exist limited sets of initial conditions for which singular solutions occur in the phase space. With regard to the loop quantum cosmology case, we demonstrate that stable de Sitter fixed points exist, for some values of the free parameters of the theory, and interestingly enough, for the same values, singular solutions corresponding to general sets of initial conditions occur. To our knowledge this feature does not occur so frequently in loop quantum cosmological frameworks. We also demonstrate that non-singular solutions corresponding to a general set of initial conditions occur, however these occur when the dark matter superfluid has negative pressure, so it is a rather physically unappealing situation.

Ancient Polyploidy and Genome Evolution in Palms.

Mechanisms of genome evolution are fundamental to our understanding of adaptation and the generation and maintenance of biodiversity, yet genome dynamics are still poorly characterized in many clades. Strong correlations between variation in genomic attributes and species diversity across the plant tree of life suggest that polyploidy or other mechanisms of genome size change confer selective advantages due to the introduction of genomic novelty. Palms (order Arecales, family Arecaceae) are diverse, widespread, and dominant in tropical ecosystems, yet little is known about genome evolution in this ecologically and economically important clade. Here, we take a phylogenetic comparative approach to investigate palm genome dynamics using genomic and transcriptomic data in combination with a recent, densely sampled, phylogenetic tree. We find conclusive evidence of a paleopolyploid event shared by the ancestor of palms but not with the sister clade, Dasypogonales. We find evidence of incremental chromosome number change in the palms as opposed to one of recurrent polyploidy. We find strong phylogenetic signal in chromosome number, but no signal in genome size, and further no correlation between the two when correcting for phylogenetic relationships. Palms thus add to a growing number of diverse, ecologically successful clades with evidence of whole-genome duplication, sister to a species-poor clade with no evidence of such an event. Disentangling the causes of genome size variation in palms moves us closer to understanding the genomic conditions facilitating adaptive radiation and ecological dominance in an evolutionarily successful, emblematic tropical clade.

Preheating in Palatini Higgs inflation

We study the details of preheating in Palatini Higgs inflation. We show, that contrary to what happens in the metric formulation of the model, the Universe does not reheat through the creation of gauge bosons only, but also through the tachyonic production of Higgs excitations. The latest entropy production channel turns out to be very efficient and leads to an almost instantaneous onset of radiation domination after the end of inflation. As compared to the metric case, this reduces the number of e-folds needed to solve the usual hot big bang problems while leading to a smaller spectral index for the primordial spectrum of density perturbations.

Effects of spatial curvature on the f (R) gravity phase space: no inflationary attractor?

In this paper we study the effects of spatial curvature of the metric on the phase space of vacuum gravity. Particularly, we appropriately choose the variables of the dynamical system, in order for this to be autonomous, and we study the phase space of the resulting theory, focusing on de Sitter, matter and radiation domination fixed points. Our analysis indicates that the effect of spatial curvature on the phase space is radical, since it destabilizes all the stable de Sitter vacua of the flat spacetime vacuum gravity phase space, making the phase space having non-trivial unstable submanifolds. This instability occurs regardless if the spacetime has elliptic or hyperbolic spatial sections, and it is also robust towards the choice of initial conditions. We investigate the source of the instability in the system, and also we discuss the stability of the matter and radiation domination vacua, which, as we demonstrate, are also highly unstable. Our results for de Sitter attractors indicate that the stable de Sitter attractors of the vacuum gravity theory for a flat Universe, are destabilized by the presence of curvature, and this shows that inflation for vacuum gravity in non-flat spacetime is problematic, at least at the phase space level. This result holds true for both elliptic and hyperbolic spacetimes.

Gravitational waves from global cosmic strings in quintessential inflation

The combination of non-minimal couplings to gravity with the post-inflationary kinetic-dominated era typically appearing in quintessential inflation scenarios may lead to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of internal symmetries and its eventual restoration at the onset of radiation domination. On general grounds, the breaking of these symmetries leads to the generation of short-lived topological defects that tend to produce gravitational waves until the symmetry is restored. We study here the background of gravitational waves generated by a global cosmic string network following the dynamical symmetry breaking and restoration of a U(1) symmetry. The resulting power spectrum depends on the duration of the heating process and it is potentially detectable, providing a test on the existence of non-minimal couplings to gravity and the characteristic energy scale of post-inflationary physics.

F(R,\xa0T) models applied to baryogenesis

This paper is devoted to the reproduction of the gravitational baryogenesis epoch in the context of f(R, T) theory of gravity, where R and T are respectively the curvature scalar and the trace of the energy-momentum tensor, respectively. It is assumed a minimal coupling between matter and gravity. In particular we consider the following two models, f(R,T) = R +alpha T + beta T^2 and f(R,T) = R+ mu R^2 + lambda T, with the assumption that the universe is filled by dark energy and perfect fluid where the baryon to entropy ratio during a radiation domination era is non-zero. We constrain the models with the cosmological gravitational baryogenesis scenario, highlighting the appropriate values of model’s parameters compatible with the observation data of the baryon-entropy ratio.

Do we need fine-tuning to create primordial black holes?

Recently, the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs) from the collapse of primordial fluctuations has received much attention. The abundance of PBHs formed during radiation domination is sensitive to the tail of the probability distribution of primordial fluctuations. We quantify the level of fine-tuning due to this sensitivity. For example, if the main source of dark matter is PBHs with mass $10^{-12}M_\odot$, then anthropic reasoning suggests that the dark matter to baryon ratio should range between 1 and 300. For this to happen, the root-mean-square amplitude of the curvature perturbation has to be fine-tuned within a $7.1\%$ range. As another example, if the recently detected gravitational-wave events are to be explained by PBHs, the corresponding degree of fine-tuning is $3.8\%$. We also find, however, that these fine-tunings can be relaxed if the primordial fluctuations are highly non-Gaussian, or if the PBHs are formed during an early-matter-dominated phase. We also note that no fine-tuning is needed for the scenario of a reheating of the universe by evaporated PBHs with Planck-mass relics left to serve as dark matter.

Second-order cosmological perturbations. III. Produced by scalar-scalar coupling during radiation-dominated stage

We study the 2nd-order scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations in Robertson-Walker (RW) spacetime in synchronous coordinates during the radiation dominated (RD) stage. The dominant radiation is modeled by a relativistic fluid described by a stress tensor $T_{\mu\nu}=(\rho+p)U_\mu U_\nu+g_{\mu\nu}p$ with $p= c^2_s \rho$, and the 1st-order velocity is assumed to be curlless. We analyze the solutions of 1st-order perturbations, upon which the solutions of 2nd-order perturbation are based. We show that the 1st-order tensor modes propagate at the speed of light and are truly radiative, but the scalar and vector modes do not. The 2nd-order perturbed Einstein equation contains various couplings of 1st-order metric perturbations, and the scalar-scalar coupling is considered in this paper. We decompose the 2nd-order Einstein equation into the evolution equations of 2nd-order scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations, and the energy and momentum constraints. The coupling terms and the stress tensor of the fluid together serve as the effective source for the 2nd-order metric perturbations. The equation of covariant conservation of stress tensor is also needed to determine $\rho$ and $U^\mu$. By solving this set of equations up to 2nd order analytically, we obtain the 2nd-order integral solutions of all the metric perturbations, density contrast and velocity. To use these solutions in applications, one needs to carry out seven types of the numerical integrals. We perform the residual gauge transformations between synchronous coordinates up to 2nd order, and identify the gauge-invariant modes of 2nd-order solutions.