Conveners
M4-4 Cosmology (DTP) / Cosmologie (DPT)
- Levon Pogosian (Simon Fraser University)
We discuss interaction of gravitational waves with matter including plasma and its implications for cosmology.
We present a study of the evolution of entanglement entropy of matter and geometry in quantum cosmology. We show that entanglement entropy increases rapidly as the Universe expands, and then saturates to a constant non-zero value. The saturation value of the entropy is a linear function of the energy E associated to the quantum state: S=γE. This result suggests a ‘First Law’ of matter-gravity...
We report a formal analogy between cosmology and earth science. The history of a closed universe is analogous to an equilibrium beach profile (i.e., the depth of the water as one recedes from a beach moving seaward). A beach profile reaches equilibrium in summer and in winter and is described by a variational principle that minimizes energy dissipation. The oceanography side of the analogy...
It has been shown beyond reasonable doubt that about 95% of the total energy budget of the universe is given by the dark constituents, namely Dark Matter and Dark Energy. What constitutes Dark Matter and Dark Energy remains to be satisfactorily understood however, despite a number of promising candidates. An associated conundrum is that of coincidence, as to why the Dark Matter and Dark Energy...
False vacuum decay in quantum mechanical first order phase transitions is a phenomenon with wide implications in cosmology, and presents interesting theoretical challenges. In the standard approach, it is assumed that false vacuum decay proceeds through the formation of bubbles that nucleate at random positions in spacetime and subsequently expand. In this paper we investigate the presence of...
Cosmology presupposes that on scales of $10^{8}$ light years the universe is the same at every point and in every direction. This is observationally supported by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) which has a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin in all directions. However, there exist small perturbations on this symmetric background - for example the CMB has perturbations of 0.001 Kelvin. A study of...
While Big Bang cosmology successfully explains much of the history of our universe, there are certain features it does not explain, for example the spatial flatness and uniformity of our universe. One widely studied explanation for these features is cosmological inflation. I will discuss the gravitational wave spectra generated by inflaton field configurations oscillating after inflation for...
The purpose of this presentation is to recognize the effects of electromagnetic energy injection into the early Universe from decaying sub-GeV dark vectors. Decay widths and energy spectra for the most prominent channels in the sub-GeV region are calculated for various dark vector models. The models include the kinetic mixing of the dark photon with the Standard Model photon, $U(1)_{A'}$ , a...
Much of what we know of the early universe comes from observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB): a 13 billion-year-old field of microwave radiation that permeates the entire universe. Recent technological advances have made real the possibility of combining CMB measurements with other large data sets to extract hitherto inaccessible cosmological information. One such example is the...
