Narrow Results

Primordial gravitational waves, after they enter the horizon and decay away, leave a residual displacement in test particles: a memory, in analogy with gravitational waves generated by astrophysical sources. The late-time distance between test particles is related to the one at early times by ${\xi }_{\mathrm{\text{late}}}^i=\frac{a_{\mathrm{\text{late}}}}{a_{\mathrm{\text{early}}}}({\delta }_j^i-\frac{1}{2}{\bar{h}}_j^i){\xi }_{\mathrm{\text{early}}}^j$. Therefore, the deformation of an initial spherical shell does not depend on the cosmological evolution, but only on the primordial value ${\bar{h}}_j^i$ of the gravitational wave. The memory is thus related to the adiabatic tensor mode that maps the unperturbed FLRW geometries at early and late times; this is analogous to the relation between memory in Minkowski spacetime and the BMS group. The primordial memory is also connected to the consistency relations of cosmological correlators, as the flat-space memory is related to the soft theorems for gravitational wave emission. We comment on the signature of the effect on the CMB B-modes and on the large-scale structure. There is also a primordial memory effect that is subleading in the spatial gradients of the wave: it is encoded in the rotation of free-falling gyroscopes.

To the memory of Valery A. Rubakov. Contribution to the special issue of the International Journal of Modern Physics A.

We discuss possible roles in the Early Universe of the electroweak (EW) phase transition, which endows masses to the various particles, and the QCD phase transition, which gives rise to quark confinement and chiral symmetry breaking. Both phase transitions are well-established phenomena in the standard model of particle physics. Presumably, the EW phase transition would have taken place in the early universe at around 10^-11sec, or at the temperature of about 300 GeV while QCD phase transition occurred between 10^-5sec and 10^-4sec, or at about 150 MeV. In this article, I wish to model the EW or QCD phase transition in the early universe as driven by a complex scalar field with spontaneous symmetry breaking such that the continuous degeneracy of the true ground states can be well represented. Specific interest has been directed to nucleation of domains, production of domain walls, and subsequent re-organization of domain walls resulting in "domain-wall nuggets". It is suggested that the domain-wall nuggets contribute to dark matter in the present Universe.

It is well known that when a fermion propagates in curved spacetime, its spin couples to the curvature of background spacetime. We propose that this interaction for neutrinos propagating in early curved universe could give rise to a new set of dispersion relations and then neutrino asymmetry at equilibrium. We demonstrate this with the Bianchi models which describe the homogeneous but anisotropic and axially symmetric universe. If the lepton number violating processes freeze out at 10^-37 s when temperature T~10¹⁵GeV, neutrino asymmetry of the order of 10^-10 can be generated. A net baryon asymmetry of the same magnitude can thus be generated from this lepton asymmetry either by a GUT B-L symmetry or by the electroweak sphaleron processes which have B+L symmetry.

Einstein's field equations with variable gravitational and cosmological "constants" are considered in the presence of perfect fluid for a spatially homogeneous and isotropic universe. Exact solutions of the field equations are obtained by using the "gamma-law" equation of state p=(γ-1)ρ, where the adiabatic parameter γ, varies with cosmic time. The functional form of γ, which is assumed to be the function of scale factor R as proposed by Carvalho, is used to describe the early evolution of universe. A unified description of early universe is given in which an inflationary phase is followed by radiation-dominated phase. The various physical aspects of the models are also discussed.

The hypothesis that dark matter consists of superheavy particles with the mass close to the Grand Unification scale is investigated. These particles were created from vacuum by the gravitation of the expanding Universe and their decay led to the observable baryon charge. Some part of these particles with the lifetime larger than the time of breaking of the Grand Unification symmetry became metastable and survived up to the modern time as dark matter. However, in active galactic nuclei due to large energies of dark matter particles swallowed by the black hole and the possibility of the Penrose process for rotating black hole the opposite process can occur. Dark matter particles become interacting. Their decay on visible particles at the Grand Unification energies leads to the flow of ultra high energy cosmic rays observed by the Auger group. Numerical estimates of the effect leading to the observable numbers are given.

Spectroscopic observations of metal poor halo stars give an indication of a possible primordial plateau of ⁶Li abundance as a function of metallicity similar to that for ⁷Li. The inferred abundance of ⁶Li is ~1000 times larger than that predicted by standard big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) for the baryon-to-photon ratio inferred from the WMAP data, and that of ⁷Li is about 3 times smaller than the prediction. We study a possible solution to both the problems of underproduction of ⁶Li and overproduction of ⁷Li in BBN. This solution involves a hypothetical massive, negatively-charged particle that would bind to the light nuclei produced in BBN. The particle gets bound to the existing nuclei after the usual BBN, and a second epoch of nucleosynthesis can occur among nuclei bound to the particles. We numerically carry out a fully dynamical BBN calculation, simultaneously solving the recombination and ionization processes of negatively-charged particles by normal and particle-bound nuclei as well as many possible nuclear reactions among them. It is confirmed that BBN in the presence of these hypothetical particles can solve the two Li abundance problems simultaneously.

Neutrinos are produced copiously in the early universe. Neutrinos and antineutrinos ceased to be in equilibrium with radiation when the weak interaction rate becomes slower than the rate expansion of the universe. The ratio of the temperature of the photon to the temperature of the neutrino at this stage is T_γ/T_ν = (11/4)^1/3. We investigate the neutrino energy loss due to the oscillation of the electron neutrino into a different flavor in the charged-current interaction of ν_e-e^- based on the work of Sulaksono and Simanjuntak. The energy loss from the neutrinos ΔE_ν during the decoupling of the neutrinos with the rest of the matter would be a gain in the energy of the electrons and can be obtained from the integration of stopping power equation ΔE_ν = (dE_ν/dT^-1)dT^-1 where E_ν and T are the energy of the neutrinos and the temperature respectively. When the universe expands and matter-radiation decouples, an extra energy will be transferred to the photons via the annihilation of the electron-positron pairs, e⁺+e^-→γ+γ. This consequently will increase the temperature of the photons. The net effect to the lowest order is an increase in the ratio of the photon temperature to the neutrino temperature. The magnitude of energy loss of the neutrino is ∼10^-4-10^-5 MeV for the probability of conversion of ν_e → ν_i (i = μ,τ) between 0 to 1.0.

We propose a mechanism to have a smooth transition from a pre-Big Bang phase to a standard cosmological phase. Such transition is driven by gravitational production of heavy massive string states that backreact on the geometry to stop the growth of the curvature. Close to the string scale, particle creation can become effective because the string phase space compensate the exponential suppression of the particle production. Numerical solutions for the evolution of the Universe with this source are presented.

Direct searches for dark matter lead to serious problems for simple models with stable neutral Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as candidates for dark matter. A possibility is discussed that new stable quarks and charged leptons exist and are hidden from detection, being bound in neutral dark atoms of composite dark matter. Stable -2 charged particles O^-- are bound with primordial helium in O-helium (OHe) atoms, being specific nuclear interacting form of composite Warmer than Cold dark matter. Slowed down in the terrestrial matter, OHe is elusive for direct methods of underground dark matter detection based on the search for effects of nuclear recoil in WIMP-nucleus collisions. The positive results of DAMA experiments can be explained as annual modulation of radiative capture of O-helium by nuclei. In the framework of this approach, test of DAMA results in detectors with other chemical content becomes a nontrivial task, while the experimental search of stable charged particles at LHC or in cosmic rays acquires a meaning of direct test for composite dark matter scenario.

A simplified (but consistent) description of particle-production back-reaction effects in de Sitter spacetime is given.

We study electroweak baryogenesis within the framework of the littlest Higgs model with T-parity. This model has shown characteristics of a strong first-order electroweak phase transition, which is conducive to baryogenesis in the early Universe. In the T-parity symmetric theory, there are two gauge sectors, viz., the T-even and the T-odd ones. We observe that the effect of the T-parity symmetric interactions between the T-odd and the T-even gauge bosons on gauge-Higgs energy functional is quite small, so that these two sectors can be taken to be independent. The T-even gauge bosons behave like the Standard Model gauge bosons, whereas the T-odd ones are instrumental in stabilizing the Higgs mass. For the T-odd gauge bosons in the symmetric and asymmetric phases and for the T-even gauge bosons in the asymmetric phase, we obtain, using the formalism of Arnold and McLerran, very small values of the ratio (Baryon number violation rate/Universe expansion rate). We observe that this result, in conjunction with the scenario of inverse phase transition in the present work and the value of the ratio obtained from the lattice result of sphaleron transition rate in the symmetric phase, can provide us with a plausible baryogenesis scenario.

The nature of cosmological dark matter finds its explanation in physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles. The landscape of dark matter candidates contains a wide variety of species, either elusive or hardly detectable in direct experimental searches. Even in case, when such searches are possible the interpretation of their results implies additional sources of information, which provide indirect effects of dark matter. Some nontrivial probes for the nature of the dark matter are presented in the present issue.

The nonbaryonic dark matter of the Universe is assumed to consist of new stable forms of matter. Their stability reflects symmetry of micro-world and mechanisms of its symmetry breaking. In the early Universe heavy metastable particles can dominate, leaving primordial black holes (PBHs) after their decay, as well as the structure of particle symmetry breaking gives rise to cosmological phase transitions, from which massive black holes (BHs) and/or their clusters can originate. PBHs can be formed in such transitions within a narrow interval of masses about 10¹⁷g and, avoiding severe observational constraints on PBHs, can be a candidate for the dominant form of dark matter. PBHs in this range of mass can give solution of the problem of reionization in the Universe at the redshift z~5–10. Clusters of massive PBHs can serve as a nonlinear seeds for galaxy formation, while PBHs evaporating in such clusters can provide an interesting interpretation for the observations of point-like gamma-ray sources. Analysis of possible PBH signatures represents a universal probe for super-high energy physics in the early Universe in studies of indirect effects of the dark matter.

The q-theory approach to the cosmological constant problem is reconsidered. The new observation is that the effective classical q-theory gets modified due to the back-reaction of quantum-mechanical particle production by spacetime curvature. Furthermore, a Planck-scale cosmological constant is added to the potential term of the action density, in order to represent the effects from zero-point energies and phase transitions. The resulting dynamical equations of a spatially-flat Friedmann–Robertson–Walker universe are then found to give a steady approach to the Minkowski vacuum, with attractor behavior for a finite domain of initial boundary conditions on the fields. The approach to the Minkowski vacuum is slow and gives rise to an inflation-type increase of the particle horizon.

We investigate cosmological constraints on the original relaxion scenario proposed by Graham, Kaplan and Rajendran. We first discuss the appropriate sign choice of the terms in the scalar potential, when the QCD axion is the relaxion with a relaxion–inflaton coupling proposed in the original paper. We next derive the cosmologically consistent ranges of the mass and a coupling of the relaxion for both the QCD relaxion and non-QCD relaxion. The mass range is obtained by $10^{-5}\mathrm{\text{eV}}\ll m_{\varphi }\lesssim 10^4\mathrm{\text{eV}}$. We also find that a strong correlation between the Hubble parameter at the relaxion stabilization and the scale $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ of non-QCD strong dynamics, which generates the non-perturbative relaxion cosine potential. For a higher relaxion mass, a large scale $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ becomes available. However, for its lower mass, $\mathrm{\Lambda }$ should be small and constructing such a particle physics model is challenging.

In this work, an update of the cosmological role and place of the chiral tensor particles in the Universe history is provided. We discuss an extended model with chiral tensor particles. The influence of these particles on the early Universe evolution is studied. Namely, the increase of the Universe expansion rate caused by the additional particles in this extended model is calculated, their characteristic interactions with the particles of the hot Universe plasma are studied and the corresponding times of their creation, scattering, annihilation and decay are estimated for accepted values of their masses and couplings, based on the recent experimental constraints. The period of abundant presence of these particles in the Universe evolution is determined.

Under conformal transformation, $f(\Re )$ theory of gravity in Palatini formalism leads to a Brans–Dicke type of scalar-tensor equivalent theory with a wrong sign in the effective kinetic energy term. This means that the effective scalar acts as the dark energy and so late-time cosmic acceleration in the matter-dominated era is accountable. However, we unveil some aspects of Palatini formalism, which reveals the fact that the formalism is not suitable to explain the cosmological evolution of the early universe with $f(\Re )$ gravity alone. Additionally, it is noticed that some authors, in an attempt to explore Noether symmetry of the theory changed the sign of the kinetic term and hence obtained the wrong answer. Here, we make the correction and unmask a very interesting aspect of symmetry analysis. Mathematical inequivalence between Jordan’s and Einstein’s frame in Palatini $f(\Re )$ theory has also been revealed.

The early Universe was characterized by the presence of heavy particles that decoupled at different temperatures leading to different phases of the Universe. This had some consequences on the time evolution of the thermodynamic and the cosmological parameters characterizing each phase of the early Universe. In this study, we derive the analytic expressions of the equations governing the time evolution of these parameters using the equations of state of the MIT bag model describing the quark–gluon plasma era. In addition, using the equations of state derived from considering the recent results of the lattice QCD simulations, we solve numerically the differential equation governing the time evolution of the energy density in the early Universe. The time evolution of the parameters under concern including the energy density, entropy density, temperature, pressure in addition to Hubble parameter and scale factor can then be estimated as will be presented in this work.

General theory of relativity can be equivalently formulated on a flat spacetime associating a torsion-free affine connection of non-vanishing non-metricity scalar Q. In this paper, we present an extension of this, viz., the $f(Q)$ theory of gravity, and explore the early evolution of the universe in the background of anisotropic Bianchi-I model. The $f(Q)$ theory in the current setting through its geometric modification is quite successful in explaining the late time accelerated expansion. Here, we note that it accommodates latest released constraints on the inflationary parameters by Planck’s collaboration group with excellent precession, but fails to produce a viable decelerated expansion in the radiation dominated era.

The hypothesis that cold dark matter consists of primordial superheavy particles, the decay of short lifetime component of which led to the observable mass of matter while long living component survived up to modern times manifesting its presence in high energetic cosmic rays particles is investigated.