Cosmology and Gravitation

For nearly the past century, the nature of dark matter in the Universe has puzzled astronomers and physicists. During the next decade, experiments will determine if a substantial amount of the dark matter is in the form of non-baryonic, Weakly-Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). In this talk I will discuss and interpret modern limits on WIMP dark matter from a variety of complementary methods. I will show that we are just now obtaining sensitivity to probe the parameter space of cosmologically-predicted WIMPs created during the earliest epoch in the Universe. I will discuss the science to extract from a positive signal in different experiments, and the prospects for an era of dark matter astrophysics.

The availability of high precision observational data in cosmology means that it is possible to go beyond simple descriptions of cosmic inflation in which the expansion is driven by a single scalar field. One set of models of particular interest involve the Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) action, arising in string cosmology, in which the dynamics of the field are affected by a speed limit in a manner akin to special relativity. In this talk, I will introduce a scalar-tensor theory in which the matter component is a field with a DBI action. Transforming to the Einstein frame, I will explore the effect of the resulting coupling on the background dynamics of the fields and the first-order perturbations. The coupling forces the scalar field into the minimum of its effective potential, so the dynamics are determined by the DBI field, which has the interesting effect of increasing the number of efolds of inflation and decreasing the boost factor of the DBI field. Focusing on this case, I will show that the power spectrum of the primordial perturbations is determined by the behaviour of the perturbations of the modified DBI field and calculate the effect of varying the model parameters on the inflationary observables.

While understanding the evolution of galaxies is one of the major themes of contemporary astronomy, most empirical studies focus only on the evolution of distribution functions (e.g., the luminosity function), effectively treating galaxies in isolation. The new generation of large imaging and spectroscopic surveys make it possible to measure the clustering of galaxies with different physical properties as a function of redshift, providing complementary information to traditional distribution function studies. This approach is especially powerful, because most theoretical models of galaxy evolution are based on the underlying distribution of dark matter halos and they make strong predictions for clustering evolution. To link galaxies to dark matter halos from the observed galaxy clustering, I will introduce the halo occupation distribution (HOD), which characterizes the relation between galaxies and dark matter halos by the probability distribution that a halo of virial mass M contains N galaxies of a given type, together with the spatial and velocity distributions of galaxies within halos. I will present HOD modeling results for galaxy clustering measured in several surveys, including the SDSS (z~0), the DEEP2 (z~1), and the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Surveys (0<z<1). I will demonstrate that, by linking galaxies to dark matter halos, HOD modeling of galaxy clustering opens a new direction in studying galaxy evolution (and cosmology).

I will discuss a powerful way to examine the nature of dark energy using a measurement of the growth of galaxy clusters over cosmic time. A novel technique that uses the Cosmic Microwave Background as a backlight allows the detection of galaxy clusters out to the time of their first formation. Using this technique, I will present the first constraints on cosmological parameters obtained with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, as well as exciting prospects for the future.

Black holes are associated with a variety of the most extreme and counter-intuitive phenomena in astronomy and physics. However, despite the passage of nearly 40 years since the discovery of the first strong black hole candidate, we have scant evidence that general relativity provides an accurate description of gravity in the immediate vicinity of astrophysical black holes. Over the next few years this will change dramatically.

In the picture of eternal inflation, our observable universe resides inside a single bubble nucleated from an inflating false vacuum. Some of the theories giving rise to eternal inflation predict that we have causal access to collisions with other bubble universes, providing an opportunity to confront these theories with observation. In this talk, I will outline progress on the theoretical description of eternal inflation and bubble collisions, and present results from the first search for the effects of bubble collisions in the WMAP 7-year data.

Theories with extra dimensions naturally give rise to a large landscape of vacua stabilized by flux. I will show that the fastest decay is a giant leap to a wildly distant minimum, in which many different fluxes discharge at once. Indeed, the fastest decay is frequently the giantest leap of all, where all the fluxes discharge at once, which destabilizes the extra dimensions and begets a bubble of nothing. Finally, I will discuss how these giant leaps are mediated by the nucleation of "monkey branes" that wrap the extra dimensions.

Five decades ago, Aharonov and Bohm illustrated the indispensable role of the vector potential in quantum dynamics by showing (theoretically) that scattering electrons around a solenoid, no matter how thin, would give rise to a non-trivial cross section that had a periodic dependence on the product of charge and total magnetic flux. (This periodic dependence is due to the topological nature of the interaction.) We extend the Aharonov-Bohm analysis to the field theoretic domain: starting with the quantum vacuum (with zero particles) we compute explicitly the rate of production of electrically charged particle-antiparticle pairs induced by shaking a solenoid at some fixed frequency. (This body of work can be found in arXiv: 0911.0682 and 1003.0674.) Part II: The N-Body Problem in General Relativity from Perturbative QFT In the second portion of the talk, I will describe how one may use methods usually associated with perturbative quantum field theory to develop what is commonly known as the post-Newtonian program in General Relativity -- the weak field, non-relativistic, gravitational dynamics of compact astrophysical objects. The 2 body aspect of the problem is a large industry by now, driven by the need to model the gravitational waves expected from compact astrophysical binaries. I will discuss my efforts to generalize these calculations to the N-body case. (This work can be found in arXiv: 0812.0012.)

I will discuss the emergence of large, localized, pseudo-stable configurations (oscillons) from inflaton fragmentation at the end of inflation. Remarkably, the emergent oscillons take up >50 per cent of the energy density of the inflaton. First, I will give an overview of oscillons, provide some analytic solutions and discuss their stability. Then, I will discuss the conditions necessary for their emergence and provide estimates for their cosmological number density. I will show results from detailed 3+1-dimensional numerical simulations and compare them to the analytic estimates. Finally, I discuss possible observational consequences of oscillons in the early universe.

I introduce a general method for constraining the shape of the inflationary potential from Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization power spectra. This approach relates the CMB observables to the shape of the inflaton potential via a single source function that is responsible for the observable features in the initial curvature power spectrum. The source function is, to an excellent approximation, simply related to the slope and curvature of the inflaton potential, even in the presence of large or rapidly changing deviations from scale-free initial conditions. Oscillatory features in the WMAP temperature power spectrum have led to interest in exploring models with features in the inflationary potential, but such cases are typically studied on a case-by-case basis. This formalism generalizes previous studies by exploring the complete parameter space of inflationary models in a single analysis. I will present results from a Markov Chain Monte Carlo likelihood analysis of WMAP 7-year and other data sets that probe the inflationary potential both at large and small scales, and I will discuss constraints from upcoming high-sensitivity experiments.

The entropy outside of an event horizon can never decrease if one includes a term proportional to the horizon area. For a long time, this astonishing result had only been shown for quantum fields that are in an approximately steady state. I will describe a new proof of the generalized second law for arbitrary slices of semiclassical, rapidly-changing horizons. I will start with the simplest case, Rindler horizons, and then describe how the proof can be adapted to other cases (black holes, de Sitter, etc.) by restricting the field algebra to the horizon. The generalized second law holds because the horizon is invariant under a larger symmetry group than the rest of the spacetime.