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Di Valentino, E., Gariazzo, S., Mena, O., & Vagnozzi, S. (2020). Soundness of dark energy properties. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 045–45pp.
Abstract: Type Ia Supernovae (SNeIa) used as standardizable candles have been instrumental in the discovery of cosmic acceleration, usually attributed to some form of dark energy (DE). Recent studies have raised the issue of whether intrinsic SNeIa luminosities might evolve with redshift. While the evidence for cosmic acceleration is robust to this possible systematic, the question remains of how much the latter can affect the inferred properties of the DE component responsible for cosmic acceleration. This is the question we address in this work. We use SNeIa distance moduli measurements from the Pantheon and JLA samples. We consider models where the DE equation of state is a free parameter, either constant or time-varying, as well as models where DE and dark matter interact, and finally a model-agnostic parametrization of effects due to modified gravity (MG). When SNeIa data are combined with Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy measurements, we find strong degeneracies between parameters governing the SNeIa systematics, the DE parameters, and the Hubble constant H-0. These degeneracies significantly broaden the DE parameter uncertainties, in some cases leading to O(sigma) shifts in the central values. However, including low-redshift Baryon Acoustic Oscillation and Cosmic Chronometer measurements, as well as CMB lensing measurements, considerably improves the previous constraints, and the only remaining effect of the examined systematic is a less than or similar to 40% broadening of the uncertainties on the DE parameters. The constraints we derive on the MG parameters are instead basically unaffected by the systematic in question. We therefore confirm the overall soundness of dark energy properties.
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Abbar, S., & Capozzi, F. (2022). Suppression of fast neutrino flavor conversions occurring at large distances in core-collapse supernovae. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 03(3), 051–13pp.
Abstract: Neutrinos propagating in dense neutrino media such as core-collapse supernovae and neutron star merger remnants can experience the so-called fast flavor conversions on scales much shorter than those expected in vacuum. A very generic class of fast flavor instabilities is the ones which are produced by the backward scattering of neutrinos off the nuclei at relatively large distances from the supernova core. In this study we demonstrate that despite their ubiquity, such fast instabilities are unlikely to cause significant flavor conversions if the population of neutrinos in the backward direction is not large enough. Indeed, the scattering-induced instabilities can mostly impact the neutrinos traveling in the backward direction, which represent only a small fraction of neutrinos at large radii. We show that this can be explained by the shape of the unstable flavor eigenstates, which can be extremely peaked at the backward angles.
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Capozzi, F., Ferreira, R. Z., Lopez-Honorez, L., & Mena, O. (2023). CMB and Lyman-alpha constraints on dark matter decays to photons. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 06(6), 060–23pp.
Abstract: Dark matter energy injection in the early universe modifies both the ionization history and the temperature of the intergalactic medium. In this work, we improve the CMB bounds on sub-keV dark matter and extend previous bounds from Lyman-& alpha; observations to the same mass range, resulting in new and competitive constraints on axion-like particles (ALPs) decaying into two photons. The limits depend on the underlying reionization history, here accounted self-consistently by our modified version of the publicly available DarkHistory and CLASS codes. Future measurements such as the ones from the CMB-S4 experiment may play a crucial, leading role in the search for this type of light dark matter candidates.
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Norena, J., Verde, L., Barenboim, G., & Bosch, C. (2012). Prospects for constraining the shape of non-Gaussianity with the scale-dependent bias. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 08(8), 019–16pp.
Abstract: We consider whether the non-Gaussian scale-dependent halo bias can be used not only to constrain the local form of non-Gaussianity but also to distinguish among different shapes. In particular, we ask whether it can constrain the behavior of the primordial three-point function in the squeezed limit where one of the momenta is much smaller than the other two. This is potentially interesting since the observation of a three-point function with a squeezed limit that does not go like the local nor equilateral templates would be a signal of non-trivial dynamics during inflation. To this end we use the quasi-single field inflation model of Chen & Wang [1, 2] as a representative two-parameter model, where one parameter governs the amplitude of non-Gaussianity and the other the shape. We also perform a model-independent analysis by parametrizing the scale-dependent bias as a power-law on large scales, where the power is to be constrained from observations. We find that proposed large-scale structure surveys (with characteristics similar to the dark energy task force stage IV surveys) have the potential to distinguish among the squeezed limit behavior of different bispectrum shapes for a wide range of fiducial model parameters. Thus the halo bias can help discriminate between different models of inflation.
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Olmo, G. J. (2011). Palatini actions and quantum gravity phenomenology. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 10(10), 018–15pp.
Abstract: We show that an invariant an universal length scale can be consistently introduced in a generally covariant theory through the gravitational sector using the Palatini approach. The resulting theory is able to capture different aspects of quantum gravity phenomenology in a single framework. In particular, it is found that in this theory field excitations propagating with different energy-densities perceive different background metrics, which is a fundamental characteristic of the DSR and Rainbow Gravity approaches. We illustrate these properties with a particular gravitational model and explicitly show how the soccer ball problem is avoided in this framework. The isotropic and anisotropic cosmologies of this model also avoid the big bang singularity by means of a big bounce.
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Delhom, A., Olmo, G. J., & Singh, P. (2023). A diffeomorphism invariant family of metric-affine actions for loop cosmologies. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 06(6), 059–21pp.
Abstract: In loop quantum cosmology (LQC) the big bang singularity is generically resolved by a big bounce. This feature holds even when modified quantization prescriptions of the Hamiltonian constraint are used such as in mLQC-I and mLQC-II. While the later describes an effective description qualitatively similar to that of standard LQC, the former describes an asymmetric evolution with an emergent Planckian de-Sitter pre-bounce phase even in the absence of a potential. We consider the potential relation of these canonically quantized non-singular models with effective actions based on a geometric description. We find a 3-parameter family of metric-affine f (R) theories which accurately approximate the effective dynamics of LQC and mLQC-II in all regimes and mLQC-I in the post-bounce phase. Two of the parameters are fixed by enforcing equivalence at the bounce, and the background evolution of the relevant observables can be fitted with only one free parameter. It is seen that the non-perturbative effects of these loop cosmologies are universally encoded by a logarithmic correction that only depends on the bounce curvature of the model. In addition, we find that the best fit value of the free parameter can be very approximately written in terms of fundamental parameters of the underlying quantum description for the three models. The values of the best fits can be written in terms of the bounce density in a simple manner, and the values for each model are related to one another by a proportionality relation involving only the Barbero-Immirzi parameter.
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Carbone, C., Mena, O., & Verde, L. (2010). Cosmological parameters degeneracies and non-Gaussian halo bias. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 020–17pp.
Abstract: We study the impact of the cosmological parameters uncertainties on the measurements of primordial non-Gaussianity through the large-scale non-Gaussian halo bias effect. While this is not expected to be an issue for the standard Lambda CDM model, it may not be the case for more general models that modify the large-scale shape of the power spectrum. We consider the so-called local non-Gaussianity model, parametrized by the f(NL) non-Gaussianity parameter which is zero for a Gaussian case, and make forecasts on f(NL) from planned surveys, alone and combined with a Planck CMB prior. In particular, we consider EUCLID- and LSST-like surveys and forecast the correlations among f(NL) and the running of the spectral index alpha(s), the dark energy equation of state w, the effective sound speed of dark energy perturbations c(s)(2), the total mass of massive neutrinos M-nu = Sigma m(nu), and the number of extra relativistic degrees of freedom N-nu(rel). Neglecting CMB information on f(NL) and scales k > 0.03h/Mpc, we find that, if N-nu(rel) is assumed to be known, the uncertainty on cosmological parameters increases the error on f(NL) by 10 to 30% depending on the survey. Thus the f(NL) constraint is remarkable robust to cosmological model uncertainties. On the other hand, if N-nu(rel) is simultaneously constrained from the data, the f(NL) error increases by similar to 80%. Finally, future surveys which provide a large sample of galaxies or galaxy clusters over a volume comparable to the Hubble volume can measure primordial non-Gaussianity of the local form with a marginalized 1-sigma error of the order Delta f(NL) similar to 2 – 5, after combination with CMB priors for the remaining cosmological parameters. These results are competitive with CMB bispectrum constraints achievable with an ideal CMB experiment.
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Wagner, C., Verde, L., & Boubekeur, L. (2010). N-body simulations with generic non-Gaussian initial conditions I: power spectrum and halo mass function. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 10(10), 022–24pp.
Abstract: We address the issue of setting up generic non-Gaussian initial conditions for N-body simulations. We consider inflationary-motivated primordial non-Gaussianity where the perturbations in the Bardeen potential are given by a dominant Gaussian part plus a non-Gaussian part specified by its bispectrum. The approach we explore here is suitable for any bispectrum, i.e. it does not have to be of the so-called separable or factorizable form. The procedure of generating a non-Gaussian field with a given bispectrum (and a given power spectrum for the Gaussian component) is not univocal, and care must be taken so that higher-order corrections do not leave a too large signature on the power spectrum. This is so far a limiting factor of our approach. We then run N-body simulations for the most popular inflationary-motivated non-Gaussian shapes. The halo mass function and the non-linear power spectrum agree with theoretical analytical approximations proposed in the literature, even if they were so far developed and tested only for a particular shape (the local one). We plan to make the simulations outputs available to the community via the non-Gaussian simulations comparison project web site http://icc.ub.edu/similar to liciaverde/NGSCP.html.
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Cosme, C., Figueroa, D. G., & Loayza, N. (2023). Gravitational wave production from preheating with trilinear interactions. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 05(5), 023–30pp.
Abstract: We investigate the production of gravitational waves (GWs) during preheating with monomial/polynomial inflationary potentials, considering a trilinear coupling & phi;x2 between a singlet inflaton & phi; and a daughter scalar field x. For sufficiently large couplings, the trilinear interaction leads to an exponential production of x particles and, as a result, a large stochastic GW background (SGWB) is generated throughout the process. We study the linear and non-linear dynamics of preheating with lattice simulations, following the production of GWs through all relevant stages. We find that large couplings lead to SGWBs with amplitudes today that can reach up to h2 �(0) GW <^> 5 & BULL; 10-9. These backgrounds are however peaked at high frequencies fp > 5 & BULL; 106 Hz, which makes them undetectable by current/planned GW observatories. As the amount of GWs produced is in any case remarkable, we discuss the prospects for probing the SGWB indirectly by using constraints on the effective number of relativistic species in the universe Neff.
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Pallis, C. (2014). Linking Starobinsky-type inflation in no-scale supergravity to MSSM. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 024–31pp.
Abstract: A novel realization of the Starobinsky inflationary model within a moderate extension of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) is presented. The proposed superpotential is uniquely determined by applying a continuous R and a Z2 discrete symmetry, whereas the Kahler potential is associated with a no-scale-type SU(54, 1)/ SU(54) x U(1) R X Z2 Kahler manifold. The inflaton is identified with a Higgs-like modulus whose the vacuum expectation value controls the gravitational strength. Thanks to a strong enough coupling (with a parameter CT involved) between the inflaton and the Ricci scalar curvature, inflation can be attained even for subplanckian values of the inflaton with CT >= 76 and the corresponding effective theory being valid up to the Planck scale. The inflationary observables turn out to be in agreement with the current data and the inflaton mass is predicted to be 3 10(3) GeV. At the cost of a relatively small superpotential coupling constant, the model offers also a resolution of the f,t problem of MSSM for CT <= 4500 and gravitino heavier than about 10(4) GeV. Supplementing MSSM by three right-handed neutrinos we show that spontaneously arising couplings between the inflaton and the particle content of MSSM not only ensure a sufficiently low reheating temperature but also support a scenario of non-thermal leptogenesis consistently with the neutrino oscillation parameters.
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