Astrophysics

Is the graviton a truly massless spin-2 particle, or can the graviton have a small mass? If the mass of the graviton is of order the Hubble scale today, it can potentially help to explain the observed cosmic acceleration. Previous attempts to study massive gravity have been spoiled by the fact that a generic potential for the graviton leads to an instability called the Boulware-Deser ghost. Recently, a special potential has been constructed which avoids this problem while maintaining Lorentz invariance. In this talk I will present recent arguments that suggest that the requirement of avoiding the Boulware-Deser ghost (or other degrees of freedom) is so powerful that the kinetic term for a massive graviton is fixed as well. In fact it must be exactly the same as in General Relativity. This is remarkable as we derive the structure of General Relativity on the basis of stability requirements, not on a symmetry principle. 

Despite being ubiquitous throughout the Universe, the fundamental physics governing dark matter remains a mystery. While this physics plays little role in the current evolution of large-scale cosmic structures, it did have a major impact in the early epochs of the Universe on the evolution of cosmological density fluctuations on small causal length scales. Studying the astrophysical structures that resulted from the gravitational collapse of fluctuations on these small scales can thus yield important clues about the physics of dark matter. Today, most of these structures are locked in deep inside the potential wells of galaxies, making the study of their properties difficult. Fortunately, due to fortuitous alignments between high-redshift bright sources and us, some of these galaxies act as spectacular strong gravitational lenses, allowing us to probe their inner structure. In this talk, we present a unified framework to extract information about the power spectrum of gravitational potential fluctuations inside any type of lens galaxies. We argue that fully exploiting this new approach will likely require a paradigm shift in how we describe structures on sub-galactic scales. We finally discuss which properties of mass substructures are most readily constrained by lensing data.

I will talk about a novel theory of dark matter superfluidity that matches the success of LCDM model on cosmological scales while simultaneously reproducing the MOND phenomenology on galactic scales.

I will first briefly report the current status on the stability problem of global AdS space under gravitational self-interaction. I will then present evidence that the possibility of a blackhole-forming instability is strongly connected to phase-locked cascade, which is different from the usual energy cascade in turbulent flow.

Fundamental physics has reached a turning point. The most powerful experiments ever devised are revealing the structure of the universe with unprecedented clarity. On the largest scales – the whole visible universe – and the tiniest, we are discovering remarkable simplicity, which our theories do not yet explain. In between, things are complex. But here too, new technologies are allowing us to access the quantum frontier, opening up new high-precision probes of the fundamental laws of nature and revolutionary new technologies. We stand on the threshold of breakthroughs, both theoretical and experimental, which could change our picture of the world and the development of our society.

Oscillating signatures in the correlation functions of the primordial density perturbations are predicted by a variety of inflationary models. A theoretical mechanism that has attracted much attention is a periodic shift symmetry as implemented in axion monodromy inflation. This symmetry leads to resonance non-Gaussianities, whose key feature are logarithmically stretched oscillations. Oscillations are also a generic consequence of excited states during inflation and of sharp features in the potential. Oscillating shapes are therefore a very interesting experimental target. 

After giving an overview of the theoretical motivations, I will discuss how to search for these signatures in the CMB. Fast oscillations are difficult to search for with traditional estimation techniques, and I will demonstrate how targeted expansions, that exploit the symmetry properties of the shapes, allow to circumvent these difficulties. As a member of the Planck collaboration, I will discuss the Planck results that have been obtained using these methods in the bispectrum, as well as related results in the power spectrum. Due to their low overlap with other non-gaussian shapes, oscillating bispectrum shapes are not exhaustively constrained and a potential discovery in the CMB is therefore not yet ruled out. 

In order for quantum fluctuations during inflation to be converted to classical stochastic perturbations, they must couple to an environment which produces decoherence. Gravity introduces inevitable nonlinearities or mode couplings. We study their contribution to quantum-to-classical behavior during inflation. Working in the Schrodinger picture, we evolve the wavefunctional for scalar fluctuations, accounting for minimal gravitational nonlinearities.  The reduced density matrix for a given mode is then found by integrating out shorter-scale modes. We find that the nonlinearities produce growing phase oscillations in the wavefunctional, which decohere the single-mode reduced density matrix into a diagonal mixed state. However, the weakness of the coupling delays decoherence until the mode is much longer than the Hubble scale environment modes. In summary, the gravitational coupling of long and short scales is sufficient to produce a mixed state of classical perturbations during inflation.

Experiments and observations over the last decade and a half have persuaded cosmologists that (as yet undetected) dark energy is by far the main component of the energy budget of the universe. I review a few simple dark energy models and compare their predictions to observational data, to derive dark energy model-parameter constraints and to test consistency of different data sets. I conclude with a list of open cosmological questions.

I describe an inflation model that can generate a cosmological magnetic seed field of nG strength on Mpc length scales today that could explain observed few microG large-scale galactic magnetic fields. I also summarize some of the extensions of this model that have been developed over the last two decades, as well as open questions about such models.

The Lagrangian dynamics of a fluid element within a self-gravitational matter field is intrinsically nonlocal due to the presence of the tidal force. Instead of searching for local approximations, we provide a statistical solution that could decouple the evolution of the fluid parcel from the surrounding environment. Given the probability distribution of the matter field, the method produces a set of ordinary differential equations to be solved locally. Mathematically, it corresponds to the characteristic curve of the transport equation of the density-weighted probability density function (ρPDF). Physically, it describes the mean evolution of the element with specific density and shape averaged over various environments. Furthermore, it is guaranteed that the one-point ρPDF would be preserved if one evolves these local, yet nonlinear, curves with the same set of initial data as the real system. This PDF based method, which is well developed in turbulence and other fields, provides a new perspective for understanding the non-linear structure formation in cosmology, e.g. the halo formation and the evolution of cosmic web. For Gaussian distributed dynamical variables, we demonstrate that the localized mean tidal tensor is proportional to the shear tensor, and the coefficient would recover the prediction of Zel’dovich approximation (ZA) with the further assumption of the linearized continuity equation. For Weakly non-Gaussian field, the averaged tidal tensor could then be expressed as polynomial of other variables.  Moreover, one could further generalize this concept of the mean evolution of the fluid element to incorporate some stochastic contributions, which we suggest would be valuable in describing a variety of processes in cosmology, such as the shell-crossing and realistic halo formation.

In this talk I’ll discuss an exotic theory of gravity known as “partially massless” gravity.  The linear partially massless theory displays many features analogous to those of electromagnetism, including an electric/magnetic duality.  However, the structure of gauge charges is much richer than in E&M.  I’ll present the analogues of electric point charges and Dirac monopoles.