Interactions of cosmological gravitational waves and magnetic fields

The energy momentum tensor of a magnetic field always contains a spin-2 component in its anisotropic stress and therefore generates gravitational waves. It has been argued in the literature (Caprini & Durrer \cite{CD}) that this gravitational wave production can be very strong and that back-reaction cannot be neglected. On the other hand, a gravitational wave background does affect the evolution of magnetic fields. It has also been argued (Tsagas et al. \cite{Tsagas:2001ak},\cite{Tsagas:2005ki}) that this can lead to very strong amplification of a primordial magnetic field. In this paper we revisit these claims and study back reaction to second order.Comment: Added references, accepted for publication in PR

Testing Superstring Theories with Gravitational Waves

We provide a simple transfer function that determines the effect of an early matter dominated era on the gravitational wave background and show that a large class of compactifications of superstring theory might be tested by observations of the gravitational wave background from inflation. For large enough reheating temperatures > 10^9 \GeV the test applies to all models containing at least one scalar with mass < 10^{12}\GeV that acquires a large initial oscillation amplitude after inflation and has only gravitational interaction strength, i.e., a field with the typical properties of a modulus.Comment: 5 pages 2 figures, v2: changes in presentation, refs revised, matches version in print in PR

Constraints on the neutrino mass and the cosmological constant from large scale structure observations

The observational data on the large scale structure (LSS) of the Universe are used to establish the upper limit on the neutrino content marginalized over all other cosmological parameters within the class of adiabatic inflationary models. It is shown that the upper 2$\sigma$ limit on the neutrino content can be expressed in the form $\Omega_{\nu}h^2/N_{\nu}^{0.64}\le0.042$ or, via the neutrino mass, $m_{\nu}\le4.0$eV.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the CAPP2000 Conference, Verbier, Switzerland, July, 200

CMB anisotropies in the presence of a stochastic magnetic field

Primordial magnetic fields present since before the epoch of matter-radiation equality have an effect on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. The CMB anisotropies due to scalar perturbations are calculated in the gauge invariant formalism for magnetized adiabatic initial conditions. Furthermore the linear matter power spectrum is calculated. Numerical solutions are complemented by a qualitative analysis.Comment: 26 pages, 21 figures; sections 2 and 4 expanded; matches version published in PR

Acoustic peaks and dips in the CMB power spectrum: observational data and cosmological constraints

The locations and amplitudes of three acoustic peaks and two dips in the last releases of the Boomerang, MAXIMA and DASI measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy power spectra as well as their statistical confidence levels are determined in a model-independent way. It is shown that the Boomerang-2001 data (Netterfield et al. 2001) fixes the location and amplitude of the first acoustic peak at more than 3\sigma confidence level. The next two peaks and dips are determined at a confidence level above 1\sigma but below 2\sigma. The locations and amplitudes of the first three peaks and two dips are 212+/-17, 5426+/-1218\mu K^2, 544+/-56, 2266+/-607\mu K^2, 843+/-35, 2077+/-876\mu K^2, 413+/-50, 1960+/-503\mu K^2, 746+/-89, 1605+/-650\mu K^2 respectively (1\sigma errors include statistical and systematic errors). The MAXIMA and DASI experiments give similar values for the extrema which they determine. The determined cosmological parameters from the CMB acoustic extrema data show good agreement with other determinations, especially with the baryon content as deduced from standard nucleosynthesis constraints. These data supplemented by the constraints from direct measurements of some cosmological parameters and data on large scale structure lead to a best-fit model which agrees with practically all the used experimental data within 1\sigma. The best-fit parameters are: \Omega_{\Lambda}=0.64^{+0.14}_{-0.27}, \Omega_{m}= 0.36^{+0.21}_{-0.11}, \Omega_b=0.047^{+0.093}_{-0.024}, n_s=1.0^{+0.59}_{-0.17}, h=0.65^{+0.35}_{-0.27} and \tau_c=0.15^{+0.95}_{-0.15} (plus/minus values show 1\sigma upper/lower limits obtained by marginalization over all other model parameters). The best-fit values of \Omega_{\nu} and T/S are close to zero, their 1\sigma upper limits are 0.17 and 1.7 respectively.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures; accepted by ApJ; some corrections in the text are made and a few references are adde

Tachyonic perturbations in AdS5_5 orbifolds

We show that scalar as well as vector and tensor metric perturbations in the Randall-Sundrum II braneworld allow normalizable tachyonic modes, i.e., possible instabilities. These instabilities require nonvanishing initial anisotropic stresses on the brane. We show with a specific example that within the Randall-Sundrum II model, even though the tachyonic modes are excited, no instability develops. We argue, however, that in the cosmological context instabilities might in principle be present. We conjecture that the tachyonic modes are due to the singularity of the orbifold construction. We illustrate this with a simple but explicit toy model.Comment: 11 pages, matches published versio

Magnetogenesis in Higgs-Starobinsky inflation

In the framework of mixed Higgs-Starobinsky inflation, we consider the generation of Abelian gauge fields due to their nonminimal coupling to gravity (in two different formulations of gravity -- metric and Palatini). We couple the gauge-field invariants $F_{\mu\nu}F^{\mu\nu}$ and $F_{\mu\nu}\tilde{F}^{\mu\nu}$ to an integer power of the scalar curvature $R^n$ in Jordan frame and, treating these interactions perturbatively, switch to the Einstein frame where they lead to effective kinetic and axial couplings between gauge fields and inflaton. We determine the power spectra, energy densities, correlation length, and helicality of the generated gauge fields for different values of the nonminimal coupling constants and parameter $n$. We analytically estimate the spectral index $n_{B}$ of the magnetic power spectrum and show that for $n>1$ it is possible to get the scale-invariant or even red-tilted spectrum for a wide range of modes that implies larger correlation length of the generated fields. On the other hand, the magnitude of these fields typically decreases in time becoming very small in the end of inflation. Thus, it is difficult to obtain both large magnitude and correlation length of the gauge field in the frame of this model.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Large Scale Structure Formation with Global Topological Defects. A new Formalism and its implementation by numerical simulations

We investigate cosmological structure formation seeded by topological defects which may form during a phase transition in the early universe. First we derive a partially new, local and gauge invariant system of perturbation equations to treat microwave background and dark matter fluctuations induced by topological defects or any other type of seeds. We then show that this system is well suited for numerical analysis of structure formation by applying it to seeds induced by fluctuations of a global scalar field. Our numerical results are complementary to previous investigations since we use substantially different methods. The resulting microwave background fluctuations are compatible with older simulations. We also obtain a scale invariant spectrum of fluctuations with about the same amplitude. However, our dark matter results yield a smaller bias parameter compatible with $b\sim 2$ on a scale of $20 Mpc$ in contrast to previous work which yielded to large bias factors. Our conclusions are thus more positive. According to the aspects analyzed in this work, global topological defect induced fluctuations yield viable scenarios of structure formation and do better than standard CDM on large scales.Comment: uuencoded, compressed tar-file containing the text in LaTeX and 12 Postscript Figures, 41 page