Beltran Jimenez, J., Heisenberg, L., Olmo, G. J., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2018). Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity. Phys. Rep., 727, 1–129.
Abstract: General Relativity has shown an outstanding observational success in the scales where it has been directly tested. However, modifications have been intensively explored in the regimes where it seems either incomplete or signals its own limit of validity. In particular, the breakdown of unitarity near the Planck scale strongly suggests that General Relativity needs to be modified at high energies and quantum gravity effects are expected to be important. This is related to the existence of spacetime singularities when the solutions of General Relativity are extrapolated to regimes where curvatures are large. In this sense, Born-Infeld inspired modifications of gravity have shown an extraordinary ability to regularise the gravitational dynamics, leading to non-singular cosmologies and regular black hole spacetimes in a very robust manner and without resorting to quantum gravity effects. This has boosted the interest in these theories in applications to stellar structure, compact objects, inflationary scenarios, cosmological singularities, and black hole and wormhole physics, among others. We review the motivations, various formulations, and main results achieved within these theories, including their observational viability, and provide an overview of current open problems and future research opportunities.
|
Olmo, G. J., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2015). Brane-world and loop cosmology from a gravity-matter coupling perspective. Phys. Lett. B, 740, 73–79.
Abstract: We show that the effective brane-world and the loop quantum cosmology background expansion histories can be reproduced from a modified gravity perspective in terms of an f (R) gravity action plus a g(R) term non-minimally coupled with the matter Lagrangian. The reconstruction algorithm that we provide depends on a free function of the matter density that must be specified in each case and allows to obtain analytical solutions always. In the simplest cases, the function f (R) is quadratic in the Ricci scalar, R, whereas g(R) is linear. Our approach is compared with recent results in the literature. We show that working in the Palatini formalism there is no need to impose any constraint that keeps the equations second order, which is a key requirement for the successful implementation of the reconstruction algorithm.
|
de Salas, P. F., Gariazzo, S., Martinez-Mirave, P., Pastor, S., & Tortola, M. (2021). Cosmological radiation density with non-standard neutrino-electron interactions. Phys. Lett. B, 820, 136508–9pp.
Abstract: Neutrino non-standard interactions (NSI) with electrons are known to alter the picture of neutrino de coupling from the cosmic plasma. NSI modify both flavour oscillations through matter effects, and the annihilation and scattering between neutrinos and electrons and positrons in the thermal plasma. In view of the forthcoming cosmological observations, we perform a precision study of the impact of non universal and flavour-changing NSI on the effective number of neutrinos, Neff. We present the variation of Neff arising from the different NSI parameters and discuss the existing degeneracies among them, from cosmology alone and in relation to the current bounds from terrestrial experiments. Even though cosmology is generally less sensitive to NSI than these experiments, we find that future cosmological data would provide competitive and complementary constraints for some of the couplings and their combinations.
|
Basilakos, S., Mavromatos, N. E., Mitsou, V. A., & Plionis, M. (2012). Dynamics and constraints of the dissipative Liouville cosmology. Astropart Phys., 36(1), 7–17.
Abstract: In this article we investigate the properties of the FLRW flat cosmological models in which the cosmic expansion of the Universe is affected by a dilaton dark energy (Liouville scenario). In particular, we perform a detailed study of these models in the light of the latest cosmological data, which serves to illustrate the phenomenological viability of the new dark energy paradigm as a serious alternative to the traditional scalar field approaches. By performing a joint likelihood analysis of the recent supernovae type la data (SNIa), the differential ages of passively evolving galaxies, and the baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAOs) traced by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we put tight constraints on the main cosmological parameters. Furthermore, we study the linear matter fluctuation field of the above Liouville cosmological models. In this framework, we compare the observed growth rate of clustering measured from the optical galaxies with those predicted by the current Liouville models. Performing various statistical tests we show that the Liouville cosmological model provides growth rates that match well with the observed growth rate. To further test the viability of the models under study, we use the Press-Schechter formalism to derive their expected redshift distribution of cluster-size halos that will be provided by future X-ray and Sunyaev-Zeldovich cluster surveys. We find that the Hubble flow differences between the Liouville and the LambdaCDM models provide a significantly different halo redshift distribution, suggesting that the models can be observationally distinguished.
|
Beneke, M., Hellmann, C., & Ruiz-Femenia, P. (2013). Non-relativistic pair annihilation of nearly mass degenerate neutralinos and charginos I. General framework and S-wave annihilation. J. High Energy Phys., 03(3), 148–48pp.
Abstract: We compute analytically the tree-level annihilation rates of a collection of non-relativistic neutralino and chargino two-particle states in the general MSSM, including the previously unknown off-diagonal rates. The results are prerequisites to the calculation of the Sommerfeld enhancement in the MSSM, which will be presented in subsequent work. They can also be used to obtain concise analytic expressions for MSSM dark matter pair annihilation in the present Universe for a large number of exclusive two-particle final states.
|