Cosmology and Gravitation

We are entering the golden age of multi-wavelength astronomical surveys. In the 2020s, a plethora of surveys (such as Euclid, eROSITA, Rubin-LSST, Simons Observatory, and CMB-S4) are underway or planned to provide unprecedented insights into cosmology and astrophysics. In this talk, I will discuss the significant scientific opportunities and challenges that arise in the era of big data, highlighting recent advances in computational modeling and the roles of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Galaxies are the medium through which we study the structure of the universe. However, widely applied statistical models of galaxies are generally over-simplified: even recently proposed models cannot capture the dependencies on environment or formation history. To solve this problem, I will introduce Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), a general and ideal tool for physical modelling. Geometrically constrained GNNs vastly improve our models, and allow us to ask detailed questions about the importance of formation history and environment for cosmological galaxy modeling. I will also prove a surprising equivalence between these two aspects of galaxy formation.

The generation of large scales white noise is a generic property of the dynamics of physical systems described by local non-linear partial differential equations. Non-linearities prevent the small scale dynamics to be erased by smoothing. Unresolved small scale dynamics act as an uncorrelated (white or Poissonian) noise (seemingly stochastic but actually deterministic) contribution to large scale dynamics. Such is the case for cosmic inhomogeneities. In the standard model of cosmology the primordial density power spectrum is taken to be sub-Poissonian and subsequent non-linear evolutions will inevitably produce white noise which will dominate on the largest scales. Non-observation of white noise on the Hubble scale precludes a power law extrapolation of the power spectrum below one comoving parsec and places severe constraints on a wide variety of phenomena in the early universe, including phase transitions, vorticity and gravitational radiation.

On April 4th, 2024, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) released its first set of cosmological results based on measurements of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) scale in the spatial distribution of galaxies and quasars, and in the Lyman-alpha forest. Those measurements constrain the expansion history of the Universe in the redshift range 0.1 < z < 4.16, with implications for studies of dark energy, neutrino cosmology and the Hubble constant. To make the most of the cosmological information content of the galaxy & quasar distributions, we now analyze the full shape of their power spectra, constraining the evolution of the large scale structure of the Universe over the range 0.1 < z < 2.1. In this talk, following a brief overview of the DESI instrument and observations, we will present the latest public results, discuss some of their main cosmological implications, highlight efforts towards the full shape results and expectations for the next data release.

Claims of a low clustering amplitude (S_8) at low redshifts from weak galaxy lensing measurements trace back nearly a decade, however, recent work suggests these results may be driven by large baryonic feedback or mischaracterization of linear alignments. I will present a complimentary approach to measure the evolution of S_8(z) using spectroscopically calibrated DESI galaxies and the latest CMB lensing measurements from Planck and ACT. These data are insensitive to many of the systematic complications present in galaxy lensing measurements, while our fiducial Hybrid Effective Field Theory model robustly regulates the information obtainable from smaller scales, such that our cosmological constraints are reliably derived from the (predominantly) linear regime. Our tomographic analysis of DESI Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) prefers a slightly lower (5 − 7%) value of S_8 than primary CMB measurements with a statistical significance ranging from 1.8 − 2.3σ. Intriguingly, our lowest redshift LRG bin is most discrepant with a Planck cosmology, leaving open the possibility that structure growth is slowing down for redshifts z < 0.5. To address this possibility, I will conclude my talk with preliminary results from the DESI Bright Galaxy Survey, which enable tomographic S_8(z) measurements over the redshift range 0.1 \lesssim z \lesssim 0.4.

Pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) consist of a set of regularly monitored millisecond pulsars with extremely stable rotational periods. The arrival time of pulses can be altered by the passage of gravitational waves (GWs) between them and the Earth, thus serving as a galaxy-wide GW detector. Evidence for the first detection of low-frequency (~nHz) gravitational waves has recently been reported across multiple PTA collaborations, opening a new observational window into the Universe. Although the origin of the GW signal is yet to be determined, the dominant sources are expected to be inpiralling supermassive black holes (SMBHs). I will discuss a recent work in which we compare the GW detections by PTAs with the expected signal implied by existing electromagnetic observations in a simple but robust manner. This study suggests that the currently measured GW amplitude is larger than expected by a significant amount. I will then show that additional information regarding the typical number of sources contributing to the background can already be inferred from current PTA data.

Recent advances in General Relativity point toward unanticipated, and dynamic, relations between ultracompact objects and the universe they inhabit. The possibility for strongly gravitating systems, like astrophysical black holes (BHs) and their embedding cosmology, to directly interact has been dubbed "cosmological coupling." We focus on recent results from the DOE Stage IV Dark Energy (DE) Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which strongly suggest that DE is dynamical. Using typical empirical models for the cosmic star-formation rate density as a proxy to BH production, we show that the DESI-inferred time-evolution of DE is consistent with cosmologically coupled stellar-collapse BHs as the source of DE. The predicted cosmological expansion rate today, H_0 = 69.94 +/- 0.81 km/Mpc/s, is in excellent agreement with H_0 = 69.58 +/- 1.58 km/Mpc/s recently reported by the Chicago-Carnegie Hubble Program using Cepheid, Tip of the Red Giant Branch, and J-Region Asymptotic Giant Branch stellar distance-ladder calibrations. With DESI Redshift Space Distortions and Year 3 datasets on the horizon, we highlight exciting prospects for further observational confrontation in the near term.

In this seminar, I will discuss recent progress towards developing robust methods to constrain PNG in the non-linear regime based on the LSS consistency relations — non-perturbative statements about the structure of LSS correlation functions derived from symmetries of the LSS equations of motion. Specifically, I will present non-perturbative models for the squeezed matter bispectrum and collapsed matter trispectrum in the presence of local PNG, as well as in the presence of a more general “Cosmological Collider” signal sourced by inflationary massive particle exchange. Using N-body simulations with modified initial conditions, I will demonstrate that these models yield unbiased constraints on the amplitude of PNG deep into the non-linear regime (k~2 h/Mpc at z=0). Finally, I will discuss how these non-perturbative methods can provide insight into the scale-dependent bias signature associated with the Cosmological Collider scenario.

I will discuss recent progress on the initial conditions for inflation and how this can potentially enhance gravitational wave non-Gaussianity (NG). In particular, there is a significant additional NG contribution in the flattened configuration, offering a straightforward way to boost parity-violating NG from Chern-Simons gravity, which typically suffers from graviton ghost-production. Furthermore, I will explore how this shape – at the level of the trispectrum – can enable direct measurement of NG in the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) using pulsar timing arrays (PTA). This is particularly intriguing as it allows us to investigate NG at scales complementary to those observed in the CMB, which could help us distinguish between various early universe models and physical mechanisms.

In this talk, I will present a published and an ongoing work in the direction of emergent gravity. The first is what I dubbed as the generalized Unruh effect, a mapping from arbitrary states in the Fock space of positive Minkowski (Kruskal) modes to Rindler (Schwarzschild) modes obtained by Bogoliubov transformation. The special case of vacuum state -- thermal bath mapping has been well known in the textbooks, the original Unruh effect. I will discuss the interesting physical implications of the generalized Unruh effect on the black hole information paradox. In the second part, I will give a novel conjecture of the dark energy when considering the spacetime as a 4d volume-conserved fluid. Einstein's equation with an always-positive metric term (Lambda, but not necessarily constant) can be interpreted as the differential version of this assumed conservation of 4d volume at linear order. The rich phenomenology of this theory will be discussed, including its solution to the anthropic problem of our currently dark-energy-dominated universe, and high-redshift over-evolved astrophysical objects that have been recently popping up in the JWST survey.

Present-day galaxies still contain a multitude of clues about their formation histories. But which properties should we best look at and what do they actually reveal about the past? Using cosmological simulations, I will show what insights about a galaxy's formation and merger history can be gained from a diverse set of measurements. For this, I will show how the overall galaxy shapes and tidal features in the outskirts are related to the inner kinematics. These results give us indications about the correlation with the recent merger histories of the galaxies. Finally, I will discuss how early gas-rich mergers can be revealed through the ages of globular cluster populations.

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