Astrophysics

The Hubble constant remains one of the most important parameters in the cosmological model, setting the size and age scales of the Universe. Present uncertainties in the cosmological model including the nature of dark energy, the properties of neutrinos and the scale of departures from flat geometry can be constrained by measurements of the Hubble constant made to higher precision than was possible with the first generations of Hubble Telescope instruments. A streamlined distance ladder constructed from infrared observations of Cepheids and type Ia supernovae with ruthless attention paid to systematics now provide <2% precision and offer the means to do much better. By steadily improving the precision and accuracy of the Hubble constant, we now see evidence for significant deviations from the standard model, referred to as LambdaCDM, and thus the exciting chance, if true, of discovering new fundamental physics such as exotic dark energy, a new relativistic particle, or a small curvature to name a few possibilities. I will review recent and expected progress.

We introduce two new effective quantities for the study of comoving curvature perturbations ζ: the space dependent effective sound speed (SESS) and the momentum dependent effective sound speed (MESS) . We use the SESS and the MESS to derive a new set of equations,  not involving explicitly entropy or anisotropies, which can be applied to any system described by an effective stress-energy-momentum tensor (EST), including any multi-fields systems, supergravity and modified gravity theories.

The MESS is the natural quantity to parametrize in a model independent way the effects produced on curvature perturbations by multi-fields systems, particle production and modified gravity theories and could be conveniently used in the analysis of LSS observations, such as the ones from the upcoming EUCLID mission or CMB radiation measurements. It can be also useful to study in a model independent way the production of primordial black holes.

Beside the degeneracy due to different theoretical scenarios producing the same MESS, we show that in absence of entropy or effective anisotropic stress there is an additional degeneracy related to the freedom in the choice of the initial energy scale of inflation, or to the sign of the Hubble parameter.  This implies the existence of an infinite family of dual slow-roll parameters histories which can produce the same spectrum of comoving curvature perturbations, implying  that in general there is no one-to-one correspondence between the spectrum and higher order correlation functions. Bounce models are  examples of  the members of this infinite class of dual models.

The combined analysis of data from future CMB and gravitational wave experiments could allow to distinguish between dual models  because the primordial tensor perturbations spectra of dual models are in general different.

I’ll discuss the issue of how we can tell which quantum state might be the “right “ one for inflationary quantum fluctuations. I’ll then use a new class of states that entangle curvature fluctuations with those of a spectator scalar field and discuss potential observational signatures of such states.