Cosmology and Gravitation

I will discuss a wide class of models which realise a bounce in a spatially flat Friedmann universe in standard General Relativity. The key ingredient is a noncanonical, minimally coupled scalar field
belonging to the class of theories with Kinetic Gravity Braiding/Galileon-like self-couplings. In these models, the universe smoothly volves from contraction to expansion, suffering neither from ghosts
nor gradient instabilities around the turning point. The end-point of he evolution can be a standard radiation-domination era or an nflationary phase.
The talk is based on arXiv:1109.1047v2 [hep-th], JCAP11(2011)021.

Recent progress in massive gravity has made it possible to construct consistent theories of interacting spin-2 fields.  In this talk I'll describe these developments, focusing on the resolution of the Boulware-Deser ghost problem and the promotion of massive gravity to a bimetric theory of gravity with two dynamical, interacting spin-2 fields.  I'll then discuss the generalization of these bimetric theories to theories of multiple interacting spin-2 fields.

The standard cosmological model posits that the universe is homogeneous and statistically isotropic on its largest scales. However, there is no fundamental reason why these properties have to hold, and in fact they can be broken due to interesting new physics. Moreover, there is some evidence from recent WMAP observations for 'anomalies' - including departures from statistical isotropy - on the largest observable scales. Large-scale structure (LSS) - including the distribution of galaxies in the universe - presents a new frontier in testing statistical isotropy and homogeneity, and we are entering an epoch with orders-of-magnitude improvement in the statistics of LSS. In this talk I first review general tests of statistical isotropy using LSS. I then describe results from research done in collaboration with my student Cameron Gibelyou on testing aspects of the statistical isotropy - in particular, dipolar modulations of the galaxy counts - using existing LSS surveys.

Inflation, a postulated epoch of accelerated expansion in the early universe, has become a principal component of the standard model of cosmology. From a wide variety of initial conditions, inflation produces a nearly homogeneous universe populated by density fluctuations that seed large-scale structure. However, inflation is such a good homogenizer that, once unleashed, in many cases it becomes eternal, ending only within spontaneously nucleated bubbles. In this scenario, our observable universe resides inside one such bubble. Surprisingly, it is possible to perform direct observational tests of eternal inflation. The most dramatic and detectable signatures of eternal inflation arise from the collision between bubbles in the very early universe, which leave an imprint on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. In this talk, I will motivate and describe the eternal inflation scenario and present the results of a search for the signatures of eternal inflation in CMB data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe.

First part: The research group in Yaounde (Cameroon), working on Mathematical Modelling and Applications is introduced. Second part: Global existence of solutions to the spatially homogeneous Einstein-Maxwell-Boltzmann system on a Bianchi type 1 space-time is proved.

We study the general class of gravitational field theories constructed on the basis of scale invariance (and therefore absence of any mass parameters) and invariance under transverse diffeomorphisms (TDiff), which are the 4-volume conserving coordinate transformations. We show that these theories are equivalent to a specific type of scalar-tensor theories of gravity (invariant under all diffeomorphisms) with a number of properties, making them phenomenologically interesting. In particular, they lead to the evolution of the universe supported by present observations: inflation in the past, followed by the radiation and matter dominated stages and accelerated expansion at present. All mass scales in this type of theories come from one and the same source. The massless particle spectrum of these theories contains the graviton and a new particle -- dilaton, which has only derivative couplings and thus escapes the fifth force constraints.

In this talk, I am going to test the concordance cosmology in three different cosmic scales. (1) On the super-horizon scale, “Copi etal. (2009)” have been arguing that the lack of large angular correlations of the CMB temperature field provides strong evidence against the standard, statistically isotropic, LCDM cosmology. I am going to argue that the “ad-hoc” discrepancy is due to the sub-optimal estimator of the low-l multipoles, and a posteriori statistics, which exaggerates the statistical significance. (2) LCDM model also predict the existence of primordial gravitational wave, for which B-mode polarization will be a powerful tool to distinguish different models of the early Universe; (3) On Galactic scales, “Watkins et al. (2008)” shows that the very large bulk flow prefers a very large density fluctuation, which seems to contradict to the LCDM model. We provide a physical explanation for this big bulk flow, based on the assumption that CMB frame does not coincide with matter rest frame, resulting in the tilted Universe. We show that the ‘tilted Universe’ could well explain the bulk flow phenomena and more importantly, the constraints for this tilted Universe can lead to the constraint on the number of e-folds of inflation; (4) In addition, cosmic Mach Number from peculiar velocity catalog may provide a powerful test of the growth of the structure.

I will discuss some work on the collider phenomenology and cosmology of light gravitino dark matter, and will touch on some related issues concerning infrared divergences in charged-particle decay at finite temperature.
Light gravitinos, with mass in the eV to MeV range, are well-motivated in particle physics, but their status as dark-matter candidates is muddled by early-Universe uncertainties.