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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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Guerrero, M., Mora-Perez, G., Olmo, G. J., Orazi, E., & Rubiera-Garcia, D. (2020). Rotating black holes in Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity: an exact solution. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 07(7), 058–31pp.
Abstract: We find an exact, rotating charged black hole solution within Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity. To this end we employ a recently developed correspondence or mapping between modified gravity models built as scalars out of contractions of the metric with the Ricci tensor, and formulated in metric-affine spaces (Ricci-Based Gravity theories) and General Relativity. This way, starting from the Kerr-Newman solution, we show that this mapping bring us the axisymmetric solutions of Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity coupled to a certain model of non-linear electrodynamics. We discuss the most relevant physical features of the solutions obtained this way, both in the spherically symmetric limit and in the fully rotating regime. Moreover, we further elaborate on the potential impact of this important technical progress for bringing closer the predictions of modified gravity with the astrophysical observations of compact objects and gravitational wave astronomy.
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Archidiacono, M., Gariazzo, S., Giunti, C., Hannestad, S., & Tram, T. (2020). Sterile neutrino self-interactions: H-0 tension and short-baseline anomalies. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 12(12), 029–20pp.
Abstract: Sterile neutrinos with a mass in the eV range have been invoked as a possible explanation of a variety of short baseline (SBL) neutrino oscillation anomalies. However, if one considers neutrino oscillations between active and sterile neutrinos, such neutrinos would have been fully thermalised in the early universe, and would be therefore in strong conflict with cosmological bounds. In this study we first update cosmological bounds on the mass and energy density of eV-scale sterile neutrinos. We then perform an updated study of a previously proposed model in which the sterile neutrino couples to a new light pseudoscalar degree of freedom. Consistently with previous analyses, we find that the model provides a good fit to all cosmological data and allows the high value of H-0 measured in the local universe to be consistent with measurements of the cosmic microwave background. However, new high l polarisation data constrain the sterile neutrino mass to be less than approximately 1 eV in this scenario. Finally, we combine the cosmological bounds on the pseudoscalar model with a Bayesian inference analysis of SBL data and conclude that only a sterile mass in narrow ranges around 1 eV remains consistent with both cosmology and SBL data.
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Caputo, A., Regis, M., Taoso, M., & Witte, S. J. (2019). Detecting the stimulated decay of axions at radio frequencies. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 03(3), 027–22pp.
Abstract: Assuming axion-like particles account for the entirety of the dark matter in the Universe, we study the possibility of detecting their decay into photons at radio frequencies. We discuss different astrophysical targets, such as dwarf spheroidal galaxies, the Galactic Center and halo, and galaxy clusters. The presence of an ambient radiation field leads to a stimulated enhancement of the decay rate; depending on the environment and the mass of the axion, the effect of stimulated emission may amplify the photon flux by serval orders of magnitude. For axion-photon couplings allowed by astrophysical and laboratory constraints (and possibly favored by stellar cooling), we find the signal to be within the reach of next-generation radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometer Array.
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Oldengott, I. M., Barenboim, G., Kahlen, S., Salvado, J., & Schwarz, D. J. (2019). How to relax the cosmological neutrino mass bound. J. Cosmol. Astropart. Phys., 04(4), 049–18pp.
Abstract: We study the impact of non-standard momentum distributions of cosmic neutrinos on the anisotropy spectrum of the cosmic microwave background and the matter power spectrum of the large scale structure. We show that the neutrino distribution has almost no unique observable imprint, as it is almost entirely degenerate with the effective number of neutrino flavours, N-eff, and the neutrino mass, m(nu). Performing a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis with current cosmological data, we demonstrate that the neutrino mass bound heavily depends on the assumed momentum distribution of relic neutrinos. The message of this work is simple and has to our knowledge not been pointed out clearly before: cosmology allows that neutrinos have larger masses if their average momentum is larger than that of a perfectly thermal distribution. Here we provide an example in which the mass limits are relaxed by a factor of two.
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