Tensor Sector Research Articles

F(R)gravity as a dark energy fluid

We study the equations for the evolution of cosmological perturbations in $f\left(\mathcal{R}\right)$ and conclude that this modified gravity model can be expressed as a dark energy fluid at background and linearised perturbation order. By eliminating the extra scalar degree of freedom known to be present in such theories, we are able to characterise the evolution of the perturbations in the scalar sector in terms of equations of state for the entropy perturbation and anisotropic stress which are written in terms of the density and velocity perturbations of the dark energy fluid and those in the matter, or the metric perturbations. We also do the same in the much simpler vector and tensor sectors. In order to illustrate the simplicity of this formulation, we numerically evolve perturbations in a small number of cases.

Nonlocal gravity with a Weyl-square term

Recent work has shown that modifications of General Relativity based on the addition to the action of a non-local term $R\,\Box^{-2}R$, or on the addition to the equations of motion of a term involving $(g_{\mu\nu}\Box^{-1} R)$, produce dynamical models of dark energy which are cosmologically viable both at the background level and at the level of cosmological perturbations. We explore a more general class of models based on the addition to the action of terms proportional to $R_{\mu\nu}\,\Box^{-2}R^{\mu\nu}$ and $C_{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}\, \Box^{-2}C^{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}$, where $C_{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}$ is the Weyl tensor. We find that the term $R_{\mu\nu}\,\Box^{-2}R^{\mu\nu}$ does not give a viable background evolution. The non-local Weyl-square term, in contrast, does not contribute to the background evolution but we find that, at the level of cosmological perturbations, it gives instabilities in the tensor sector. Thus, only non-local terms which depend just on the Ricci scalar $R$ appear to be cosmologically viable. We discuss how these results can provide a hint for the mechanism that might generate these effective non-local terms from a fundamental local theory.

Suppressing the primordial tensor amplitude without changing the scalar sector in quadratic curvature gravity

We address the question of how one can modify the inflationary tensor spectrum without changing at all the successful predictions on the curvature perturbation. We show that this is indeed possible, and determine the two quadratic curvature corrections that are free from instabilities and affect only the tensor sector at the level of linear cosmological perturbations. Both of the two corrections can reduce the tensor amplitude, though one of them generates large non-Gaussianity of the curvature perturbation. It turns out that the other one corresponds to so-called Lorentz-violating Weyl gravity. In this latter case one can obtain as small as 65% of the standard tensor amplitude. Utilizing this effect we demonstrate that even power-law inflation can be within the 2$\sigma$ contour of the Planck results.

Tensor modes in bigravity: Primordial to present

Massive bigravity, a theoretically consistent modification of general relativity with an additional dynamical rank two tensor, successfully describes the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe without a cosmological constant. Recent analyses of perturbations around a cosmological background have revealed power law instabilities in both scalar and tensor perturbations, motivating an analysis of the initial conditions, evolution, and cosmological observables to determine the viability of these theories. In this paper we focus on the tensor sector, and study a primordial stochastic gravitational wave background in massive bigravity. The phenomenology can differ from standard General Relativity due to non-trivial mixing between the two linearized tensor fluctuations in the theory, only one of which couples to matter. We study perturbations about two classes of cosmological solutions in bigravity, computing the tensor contribution to the temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and the present stochastic gravitational wave background. The result is strongly dependent on the choice of cosmological background and initial conditions. One class of background solution generically displaying tremendous growth in the amplitude of large-wavelength gravitational waves, while the other remains observationally indistinguishable from standard General Relativity for a wide variety of initial conditions. We analyze the initial conditions for tensor modes expected in an inflationary cosmology, finding again that there is a strong dependence on the assumed background. For one choice of background, the semi-classical theory is beyond the perturbative regime. For the other choice, inflation generically yields initial conditions that, when evolved, give rise to a stochastic background observationally indistinguishable from standard General Relativity.

Breaking discrete symmetries in the effective field theory of inflation

We study the phenomenon of discrete symmetry breaking during the inflationary epoch, using a model-independent approach based on the effective field theory of inflation. We work in a context where both time reparameterization symmetry and spatial diffeomorphism invariance can be broken during inflation. We determine the leading derivative operators in the quadratic action for fluctuations that break parity and time-reversal. Within suitable approximations, we study their consequences for the dynamics of linearized fluctuations. Both in the scalar and tensor sectors, we show that such operators can lead to new direction-dependent phases for the modes involved. They do not affect the power spectra, but can have consequences for higher correlation functions. Moreover, a small quadrupole contribution to the sound speed can be generated.

Mild bounds on bigravity from primordial gravitational waves

If the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves is measured in the near-future, what could it tell us about bigravity? To address this question, we study massive bigravity theories by focusing on a region in parameter space which is safe from known instabilities. Similarly to investigations on late time constraints, we implicitly assume there is a successful implementation of the Vainshtein mechanism which guarantees that standard cosmological evolution is largely unaffected. We find that viable bigravity models are subject to far less stringent constraints than massive gravity, where there is only one set of (massive) tensor modes. In principle sensitive to the effective graviton mass at the time of recombination, we find that in our setup the primordial tensor spectrum is more responsive to the dynamics of the massless tensor sector rather than its massive counterpart. We further show there are intriguing windows in the parameter space of the theory which could potentially induce distinct signatures in the B-modes spectrum.

Surfing gravitational waves: can bigravity survive growing tensormodes?

The theory of bigravity offers one of the simplest possibilities to describe a massive graviton while having self-accelerating cosmological solutions without a cosmological constant. However, it has been shown recently that bigravity is affected by early-time fast growing modes on the tensor sector. Here we argue that we can only trust the linear analysis up to when perturbations are in the linear regime and use a cut-off to stop the growing of the metric perturbations. This analysis, although more consistent, still leads to growing tensor modes that are unacceptably large for the theory to be compatible with measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), both in temperature and polarization spectra. In order to suppress the growing modes and make the model compatible with CMB spectra, we find it necessary to either fine-tune the initial conditions, modify the theory or set the cut-off for the tensor perturbations of the second metric much lower than unity. Initial conditions such that the growing mode is sufficiently suppresed can be achieved in scenarios in which inflation ends at the GeV scale.

Cosmology of bigravity with doubly coupled matter

We study cosmology in the bigravity formulation of the dRGT model where matter couples to both metrics. At linear order in perturbation theory two mass scales emerge: an hard one from the dRGT potential, and an environmental dependent one from the coupling of bigravity with matter. At early time, the dynamics is dictated by the second mass scale which is of order of the Hubble scale. The set of gauge invariant perturbations that couples to matter follow closely the same behaviour as in GR . The remaining perturbations show no issue in the scalar sector, while problems arise in the tensor and vector sectors. During radiation domination, a tensor mode grows power-like at super-horizon scales. More dangerously, the only propagating vector mode features an exponential instability on sub-horizon scales. We discuss the consequences of such instabilities and speculate on possible ways to deal with them.

The TT, TB, EB and BB correlations in anisotropic inflation

The ongoing and future experiments will measure the B-mode from different sky coverage and frequency bands, with the potential to reveal non-trivial features in polarization map. In this work we study the TT, TB, EB and BB correlations associated with the B-mode polarization of CMB map in models of charged anisotropic inflation. The model contains a chaotic-type large field complex inflaton which is charged under the U(1) gauge field. We calculate the statistical anisotropies generated in the power spectra of the curvature perturbation, the tensor perturbation and their cross-correlation. It is shown that the asymmetry in tensor power spectrum is a very sensitive probe of the gauge coupling. While the level of statistical anisotropy in temperature power spectrum can be small and satisfy the observational bounds, the interactions from the gauge coupling can induce large directional dependence in tensor modes. This will leave interesting anisotropic fingerprints in various correlations involving the B-mode polarization such as the TB cross-correlation which may be detected in upcoming Planck polarization data. In addition, the TT correlation receives an anisotropic contribution from the tensor sector which naturally decays after l ≳ 100. We expect that the mechanism of using tensor sector to induce asymmetry at low l to be generic which can also be applied to address other low l CMB anomalies.

Padé approximation and glueball mass estimates in 3d and 4d with [formula omitted] colors

A Padé approximation approach, rooted in an infrared moment technique, is employed to provide mass estimates for various glueball states in pure gauge theories. The main input in this analysis are theoretically well-motivated fits to lattice gluon propagator data, which are by now available for both SU(2) and SU(3) in 3 and 4 space–time dimensions. We construct appropriate gauge invariant and Lorentz covariant operators in the (pseudo)scalar and (pseudo)tensor sector. Our estimates compare reasonably well with a variety of lattice sources directly aimed at extracting glueball masses.

An inflationary model with small scalar and large tensor nongaussianities

We study a model of inflation where the scalar perturbations are almost gaussian while there is sizable (equilateral) nongaussianity in the tensor sector. In this model, a rolling pseudoscalar gravitationally coupled to the inflaton amplifies the vacuum fluctuations of a vector field. The vector sources both scalar and tensor metric perturbations. Both kinds of perturbations are nongaussian, but, due to helicity conservation, the tensors have a larger amplitude, so that nongaussianity in the scalar perturbations is negligible. Moreover, the tensors produced this way are chiral. We study, in the flat sky approximation, how constraints on tensor nongaussianities affect the detectability of parity violation in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We expect the model to feature interesting patterns on nongaussianities in the polarization spectra of the CMB.

Perturbations in Chromo-Natural Inflation

Chromo-Natural Inflation is the first worked example of a model of inflation in which slow-roll inflation is achieved by “magnetic drift” as opposed to Hubble friction. In this work, we give an account of the perturbations at linear order in this model. Our analysis uncovers two novel phenomena. First, the amplitude of scalar curvature perturbations is not directly tied to the shape of the inflationary potential. This allows the theory to violate na¨ıve formulations of the Lyth bound. Second, the tensor sector of the theory is significantly altered from the usual case: the non-Abelian gauge field perturbations have a tensor degree of freedom. One chirality of the this tensor can be exponentially enhanced by a temporary instability near horizon crossing; this chiral instability exists because of the classical gauge field background, which violates parity. These tensor fluctuations of the gauge field also couple to gravitational waves at linear order in perturbation theory and source a chiral spectrum of gravitational waves. This spectrum can be exponentially enhanced over the usual inflationary spectrum due to the instability in the gauge sector. These new features cause the theory in its present form to be in significant tension with current observational data. This is because the new scalar physics leads to a significant reddening of the spectral tilt in the same region of parameter space where the exponential enhancement of the gravitational wave amplitude is small enough to satisfy current constraints on the tensor-to-scalar index. Hence, the model either predicts a spectral tilt that is too red, or it overproduces gravitational waves, or both.

Multidimensional Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics: A Scalar Hamiltonian Approach to Excited States by the Imaginary Time Propagation Method

Supersymmetric quantum mechanics (SUSY-QM) is shown to provide a novel approach to the construction of the initial states for the imaginary time propagation method to determine the first and second excited state energies and wave functions for a two-dimensional system. In addition, we show that all calculations are carried out in sector one and none are performed with the tensor sector two Hamiltonian. Through our tensorial approach to multidimensional supersymmetric quantum mechanics, we utilize the correspondence between the eigenstates of the sector one and two Hamiltonians to construct appropriate initial sector one states from sector two states for the imaginary time propagation method. The imaginary time version of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation is integrated to obtain the first and second excited state energies and wave functions using the split operator method for a two-dimensional anharmonic oscillator system and a two-dimensional double well potential. The computational results indicate that we can obtain the first two excited state energies and wave functions even when a quantum system does not exhibit any symmetry. Moreover, instead of dealing with the increasing computational complexity resulting from computations in the tensor sector two Hamiltonian, this study presents a new supersymmetric approach to calculations of accurate excited state energies and wave functions by directly using the scalar sector one Hamiltonian.

Adiabatic switching approach to multidimensional supersymmetric quantum mechanics for several excited states

We present a time-dependent method for determining several approximate excited-state energies and wave functions using a vectorial approach to multidimensional supersymmetric quantum mechanics. First, a vectorial approach is used to generate the tensor sector two Hamiltonian, which is isospectral with the original scalar sector one Hamiltonian above the ground state of the sector one Hamiltonian. We construct a time-dependent Hamiltonian interpolating between the scalar sector one Hamiltonian and the tensor sector two Hamiltonian. Then, we can adiabatically switch from the ground state of the sector one Hamiltonian to the ground state of the sector two Hamiltonian by solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. In addition, by employing an initial wave packet orthogonal to that leading to the ground state of sector two, we also obtain the first-excited state of sector two. Construction of the orthogonal sector one states is trivial due to the tensor nature of sector two. The ground and first-excited states of the sector two Hamiltonian can be used with the charge operator to obtain the first two excited state wave functions of the sector one Hamiltonian. Excellent computational results are obtained for two-dimensional nonseparable degenerate and nondegenerate systems.

A Fefferman-Graham-like expansion for null warped AdS3

We consider null warped AdS(3) solutions of three-dimensional gravity coupled to a massive vector field. We isolate a certain set of non-propagating solutions to the equations of motion, which we argue are the ones relevant for understanding the stress tensor sector of the dual field theory. We construct a map from these modes to solutions of three-dimensional Einstein gravity with a negative cosmological constant, and thus show that they admit a Fefferman-Graham-like asymptotic expansion. We also compute the renormalized on-shell action for these modes at full non-linear level and propose that the dual stress-energy tensor couples to the boundary metric of the auxiliary AdS(3) spacetime. The holographic stress tensor we obtain is symmetric, conserved and its trace yields the same conformal anomaly as in AdS(3).

A new approach to the vacuum of inflationary models

A new approach is given for the implementation of boundary conditions used in solving the Mukhanov–Sasaki equation in the context of inflation. The familiar quantization procedure is reviewed, along with a discussion of where one might expect deviations from the standard approach to arise. The proposed method introduces a (model-dependent) fitting function for the z″/z and a″/a terms in the Mukhanov–Sasaki equation for scalar and tensor modes, as well as imposes the boundary conditions at a finite conformal time. As an example, we employ a fitting function and compute the spectral index, along with its running, for a specific inflationary model, which possesses background equations that are analytically solvable. The observational upper bound on the tensor to scalar ratio is used to constrain the parameters of the boundary conditions in the tensor sector as well. An overview on the generalization of this method is also discussed.

Cosmological perturbations of self-accelerating universe innonlinear massive gravity

We study cosmological perturbations of self-accelerating universe solutions in the recently proposed nonlinear theory of massive gravity, with general matter content. While the broken diffeomorphism invariance implies that there generically are 2 tensor, 2 vector and 2 scalar degrees of freedom in the gravity sector, we find that the scalar and vector degrees have vanishing kinetic terms and nonzero mass terms. Depending on their nonlinear behavior, this indicates either nondynamical nature of these degrees or strong couplings. Assuming the former, we integrate out the 2 vector and 2 scalar degrees of freedom. We then find that in the scalar and vector sectors, gauge-invariant variables constructed from metric and matter perturbations have exactly the same quadratic action as in general relativity. The difference from general relativity arises only in the tensor sector, where the graviton mass modifies the dispersion relation of gravitational waves, with a time-dependent effective mass. This may lead to modification of stochastic gravitational wave spectrum.

Cosmological perturbations inf(T)gravity

We investigate the cosmological perturbations in $f(T)$ gravity. Examining the pure gravitational perturbations in the scalar sector using a diagonal vierbein, we extract the corresponding dispersion relation, which provides a constraint on the $f(T)$ Ans\"atze that lead to a theory free of instabilities. Additionally, upon inclusion of the matter perturbations, we derive the fully perturbed equations of motion, and we study the growth of matter overdensities. We show that $f(T)$ gravity with $f(T)$ constant coincides with General Relativity, both at the background as well as at the first-order perturbation level. Applying our formalism to the power-law model we find that on large subhorizon scales ($\mathcal{O}(100\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{Mpc})$ or larger), the evolution of matter overdensity will differ from $\ensuremath{\Lambda}\mathrm{CDM}$ cosmology. Finally, examining the linear perturbations of the vector and tensor sectors, we find that (for the standard choice of vierbein) $f(T)$ gravity is free of massive gravitons.

New Generalization of Supersymmetric Quantum Mechanics to Arbitrary Dimensionality or Number of Distinguishable Particles

We present here a new approach to generalize supersymmetric quantum mechanics to treat multiparticle and multidimensional systems. We do this by introducing a vector superpotential in an orthogonal hyperspace. In the case of N distinguishable particles in three dimensions this results in a vector superpotential with 3N orthogonal components. The original scalar Schrödinger operator can be factored using a 3N-component gradient operator and introducing vector "charge" operators: Q(1) and Q(1)(dagger). Using these operators, we can write the original (scalar) Hamiltonian as H(1) = Q(1)(dagger) x Q(1) + E(0)((1)), where E(0)((1)) is the ground-state energy. The second sector Hamiltonian is a tensor given by H(2) = Q(1)Q(1)(dagger) + E(0)((1)) and is isospectral with H(1). The vector ground state of sector 2, psi(0)((2)), canbe used with the charge operator Q(1)(dagger) to obtain the excited-state wave function of the first sector. In addition, we show that H(2) can also be factored in terms of a sector 2 vector superpotential with components W(2j) = -(partial partial differential ln psi(0j)((2)))/partial partial differentialx(j). Here psi(0j)((2)) is the jth component of psi(0)((2)). Then one obtains charge operators Q(2) and Q(2)(dagger) so that the second sector Hamiltonian can be written as H(2) = Q(2)(dagger)Q(2) + E(0)((2)). This allows us to define a third sector Hamiltonian which is a scalar, H(3) = Q(2) x Q(2)(dagger) + E(0)((2)). This prescription continues with the sector Hamiltonians alternating between scalar and tensor forms, both of which can be treated by the variational method to obtain approximate solutions to both scalar and tensor sectors. We demonstrate the approach with examples of a pair of separable 1D harmonic oscillators and the example of a nonseparable 2D anharmonic oscillator (or equivalently a pair of coupled 1D oscillators). We consider both degenerate and nondegenerate cases. We also present a generalization to arbitrary curvilinear coordinate systems in the Appendix.

Perturbative instabilities in Hořava gravity

We investigate the scalar and tensor perturbations in Hořava gravity, with and without detailed balance, around a flat background. Once both types of perturbations are taken into account, it is revealed that the theory is plagued by ghost-like scalar instabilities in the range of parameters which would render it power-counting renormalizable, that cannot be overcome by simple tricks such as analytic continuation. Implementing a consistent flow between the UV and IR limits seems thus more challenging than initially presumed, regardless of whether the theory approaches general relativity at low energies or not. Even in the phenomenologically viable parameter space, the tensor sector leads to additional potential problems, such as fine-tunings and super-luminal propagation.