Astrophysics

The standard structure formation model is based on the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) hypothesis where non-gravitational dark matter interactions are irrelevant for the formation and evolution of galaxies. Surprisingly, current observations allow for significant departures from the CDM hypothesis,

which could potentially leave signatures of the dark matter particle nature in the properties of galaxies. In this talk, I will describe a framework we have proposed that generalizes the theory of structure formation (in both the linear and non-linear regimes) to include new dark matter physics in order to explore galaxy formation and evolution in the broadest sense.

In this talk I will present new insights on a microscopic holographic theory for de Sitter space. I will focus on the static patch of dS, which describes our universe to a good approximation at late times. We use a conformal map between dS and the BTZ black hole times a sphere to relate the general microscopic properties of dS to those of symmetric product CFTs. In 2d CFT language, de Sitter space corresponds to a thermal bath of long string. The long string phenomenon exhibited by these CFTs implies that the excitation energy decreases at large distances in dS (contrary to the UV/IR relation in AdS/CFT). It also explains the smallness of the vacuum energy of dS. Similar results apply to Minkowski space and AdS below its curvature radius.

The Standard Model of particle physics and its implications for cosmology leave several fundamental questions unanswered, including the strong CP problem and the origins of neutrino masses, dark matter, and dark energy. Previous directions of model building beyond the Standard Model have usually focused on new high-energy physics. As an alternative direction, we have developed a class of low-energy neutrino mass and axion models at a new infrared gravitational scale, which is numerically coincident with the scale of dark energy. In this seminar, I will present this novel class of models and expand on the aspect of gravitational neutrino mass generation. My talk will also cover the wide-ranging cosmological and phenomenological model predictions, in particular the invalidity of the cosmological neutrino mass bound, enhanced neutrino decays, and soft topological defects. 

After more than 12 years of continuous data taking, the Pierre Auger Observatory has collected the largest dataset of ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) to date. The results obtained in the last years include, for example, precise and accurate measurements of the UHECR flux across a few decades in energy, revealing distinctive spectral features that can bring valuable information on different astrophysical processes like: the transition from galactic to extragalactic fluxes; the different energy loss processes to which ultra-relativistic charged particles are subject during their propagation; the energetics of the production and acceleration of particles at the candidate sources. In this talk, I should however focus on a particular observational probe, that is, the small levels of anisotropy in the flux of UHECR at different angular scales: from the small and intermediate ones, important for the identification of possible point sources, to the large angular scales, usually used to search for signs of the galactic to extragalactic transition. In particular, special attention will be devoted to the first observation of a large scale anisotropy signal at energies above 8x10^18 eV recently reported by the collaboration.

Extending the EFT of Inflation by adding marginal operators in unitary gauge that can affect the equation of motion for scalar perturbations, we unravel new inflationary models in which the dispersion relations is a sixth order polynomial. In particular we focus on the healthy marginal operators that do not infiltrate ghosts into the equations of motion and allow for gravity to decouple from the Goldstone boson above some energy scale. Various scenarios can arise depending on the parameters in the original theory. In particular, one can consider scenarios in which the mode becomes tachyonic while still it is inside the horizon. More conservatively, one can consider models in which the group velocity of the propagation becomes negative. In these inflationary models, the amplitude of scalar power spectrum gets a modulation factor, which in majority of the cases is much bigger than one.  We also show that these marginal operators leave the tensor perturbations intact, and hence the form of tensor power spectrum remains resilient even in the marginally extended EFT of inflation.  Due to the enhancement of the scalar power spectrum,  the tensor-to-scalar ratio is suppressed by a huge factor..

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a five-year, 5000 sq. deg. observing program using the Dark Energy Camera on the 4m Blanco telescope at CTIO. I will describe the cosmological analysis of large-scale structure in the Universe using 1321 sq. deg. of data taken in the first year of DES operations. The analysis combines unprecedented measurements of weak gravitational lensing and the clustering of galaxies over the redshift range 0.2 to 1.3 to derive the most precise such cosmological constraints to date. These DES results from the low-redshift Universe are consistent with those from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and support the standard cosmological model, LCDM. In the coming years, DES will produce significantly tighter constraints on cosmology through similar and additional analyses using observations over more than three times the sky-area and more than twice the integrated exposure time per object as these results.