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Testing Verlinde's emergent gravity in early-type galaxies
Verlinde derived gravity as an emergent force from the information flow,
through two-dimensional surfaces and recently, by a priori postulating the
entanglement of information in 3D space, he derived the effect of the
gravitational potential from dark matter (DM) as the entropy displacement of
dark energy by baryonic matter. In Emergent Gravity (EG) this apparent DM
depends only on the baryonic mass distribution and the present-day value of the
Hubble parameter. In this paper we test the EG proposition, formalized by
Verlinde for a spherical and isolated mass distribution, using the central
velocity dispersion, and the light distribution in a sample of 4260
massive and local early-type galaxies (ETGs) from the SPIDER sample. Our
results remain unaltered if we consider the sample of 807 roundest field
galaxies. We derive the predictions by EG for the stellar mass-to-light ratio
(M/L) and the Initial Mass Function (IMF), and compare them with the same
inferences derived from a) DM-based models, b) MOND and c) stellar population
models. We demonstrate that, consistently with a classical Newtonian framework
with a DM halo component, or alternative theories of gravity as MOND, the
central dynamics can be fitted if the IMF is assumed non-universal. The results
can be interpreted with a IMF lighter than a standard Chabrier at low-,
and bottom-heavier IMFs at larger . We find lower, but still
acceptable, stellar M/L in EG theory, if compared with the DM-based NFW model
and with MOND. The results from EG are comparable to what is found if the DM
haloes are adiabatically contracted and with expectations from spectral
gravity-sensitive features. If the strain caused by the entropy displacement
would be not maximal, as adopted in the current formulation, then the dynamics
of ETGs could be reproduced with larger M/L. (abridged)Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted to MNRAS. The updated manuscript
presents significantly altered conclusions, after discovering an internal bug
in an older version of the Mathematica package, leading to incorrect
numerical results when calculating the derivatives of Gamma function
Fluctuation Theorems
Fluctuation theorems, which have been developed over the past 15 years, have
resulted in fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of how
irreversibility emerges from reversible dynamics, and have provided new
statistical mechanical relationships for free energy changes. They describe the
statistical fluctuations in time-averaged properties of many-particle systems
such as fluids driven to nonequilibrium states, and provide some of the very
few analytical expressions that describe nonequilibrium states. Quantitative
predictions on fluctuations in small systems that are monitored over short
periods can also be made, and therefore the fluctuation theorems allow
thermodynamic concepts to be extended to apply to finite systems. For this
reason, fluctuation theorems are anticipated to play an important role in the
design of nanotechnological devices and in understanding biological processes.
These theorems, their physical significance and results for experimental and
model systems are discussed.Comment: A review, submitted to Annual Reviews in Physical Chemistry, July
2007 Acknowledgements corrected in revisio
Halo Mass Function and the Free Streaming Scale
The nature of structure formation around the particle free streaming scale is
still far from understood. Many attempts to simulate hot, warm, and cold dark
matter cosmologies with a free streaming cutoff have been performed with
cosmological particle-based simulations, but they all suffer from spurious
structure formation at scales below their respective free streaming scales --
i.e. where the physics of halo formation is most affected by free streaming. We
perform a series of high resolution numerical simulations of different WDM
models, and develop an approximate method to subtract artificial structures in
the measured halo mass function. The corrected measurements are then used to
construct and calibrate an extended Press-Schechter (EPS) model with sharp-
window function and adequate mass assignment. The EPS model gives accurate
predictions for the low redshift halo mass function of CDM and WDM models, but
it significantly under-predicts the halo abundance at high redshifts. By taking
into account the ellipticity of the initial patches and connecting the
characteristic filter scale to the smallest ellipsoidal axis, we are able to
eliminate this inconsistency and obtain an accurate mass function over all
redshifts and all dark matter particle masses covered by the simulations. As an
additional application we use our model to predict the microhalo abundance of
the standard neutralino-CDM scenario and we give the first quantitative
prediction of the mass function over the full range of scales of CDM structure
formation.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, published in MNRA
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