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Agullo, I., del Rio, A., & Navarro-Salas, J. (2017). Gravity and handedness of photons. Int. J. Mod. Phys. D, 26(12), 1742001–5pp.
Abstract: Vacuum fluctuations of quantum fields are altered in the presence of a strong gravitational background, with important physical consequences. We argue that a nontrivial spacetime geometry can act as an optically active medium for quantum electromagnetic radiation, in such a way that the state of polarization of radiation changes in time, even in the absence of electromagnetic sources. This is a quantum effect, and is a consequence of an anomaly related to the classical invariance under electric-magnetic duality rotations in Maxwell theory.
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del Rio, A., Durrer, R., & Patil, S. P. (2018). Tensor bounds on the hidden universe. J. High Energy Phys., 12(12), 094–34pp.
Abstract: During single clock inflation, hidden fields (i.e. fields coupled to the inflaton only gravitationally) in their adiabatic vacua can ordinarily only affect observables through virtual effects. After renormalizing background quantities (fixed by observations at some pivot scale), all that remains are logarithmic runnings in correlation functions that are both Planck and slow roll suppressed. In this paper we show how a large number of hidden fields can partially compensate this suppression and generate a potentially observable running in the tensor two point function, consistently inferable courtesy of a large N resummation. We detour to address certain subtleties regarding loop corrections during inflation, extending the analysis of [1]. Our main result is that one can extract bounds on the hidden field content of the universe from bounds on violations of the consistency relation between the tensor spectral index and the tensor to scalar ratio, were primordial tensors ever detected. Such bounds are more competitive than the naive bound inferred from requiring inflation to occur below the strong coupling scale of gravity if deviations from the consistency relation can be bounded to within the sub-percent level. We discuss how one can meaningfully constrain the parameter space of various phenomenological scenarios and constructions that address naturalness with a large number of species (such as N-naturalness') with CMB observations up to cosmic variance limits, and possibly future 21cm and gravitational wave observations.
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del Rio, A., & Navarro-Salas, J. (2014). Spacetime correlators of perturbations in slow-roll de Sitter inflation. Phys. Rev. D, 89(8), 084037–7pp.
Abstract: Two-point correlators and self-correlators of primordial perturbations in quasi-de Sitter spacetime backgrounds are considered. For large separations two-point correlators exhibit nearly scale invariance, while for short distances self-correlators need standard renormalization. We study the deformation of two-point correlators to smoothly match the self-correlators at coincidence. The corresponding angular power spectrum is evaluated in the Sachs-Wolfe regime of low multipoles. Scale invariance is maintained, but the amplitude of C(l)could change in a nontrivial way.
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del Rio, A., Navarro-Salas, J., & Torrenti, F. (2014). Renormalized stress-energy tensor for spin-1/2 fields in expanding universes. Phys. Rev. D, 90(8), 084017–15pp.
Abstract: We provide an explicit expression for the renormalized expectation value of the stress-energy tensor of a spin-1/2 field in a spatially flat Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker universe. Its computation is based on the extension of the adiabatic regularization method to fermion fields introduced recently in the literature. The tensor is given in terms of UV-finite integrals in momentum space, which involve the mode functions that define the quantum state. As illustrative examples of the method efficiency, we see how to compute the renormalized energy density and pressure in two interesting cosmological scenarios: a de Sitter spacetime and a radiation-dominated universe. In the second case, we explicitly show that the late-time renormalized stress-energy tensor behaves as that of classical cold matter. We also check that, if we obtain the adiabatic expansion of the scalar field mode functions with a similar procedure to the one used for fermions, we recover the well-known WKB-type expansion.
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del Rio, A., & Navarro-Salas, J. (2015). Equivalence of adiabatic and DeWitt-Schwinger renormalization schemes. Phys. Rev. D, 91(6), 064031–14pp.
Abstract: We prove that adiabatic regularization and DeWitt-Schwinger point-splitting provide the same result when renormalizing expectation values of the stress-energy tensor for spin-1/2 fields. This generalizes the equivalence found for scalar fields, which is here recovered in a different way. We also argue that the coincidence limit of the DeWitt-Schwinger proper time expansion of the two-point function agrees exactly with the analogous expansion defined by the adiabatic regularization method at any order (for both scalar and spin-1/2 fields). We also illustrate the power of the adiabatic method to compute higher order DeWitt coefficients in Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker Universes.
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