6,720 research outputs found
Primordial Nucleosynthesis: Accurate Predictions
A new accurate evaluation of primordial light nuclei abundances is presented.
The proton to neutron conversion rates have been corrected to take into account
radiative effects, finite nucleon mass, thermal and plasma corrections. The
theoretical uncertainty on 4He is so reduced to the order of 0.1%.Comment: 4 pages, Talk given at the International Workshop on Particles in
Astrophysics and Cosmology: From Theory to Observation, Valencia 199
Essential self-adjointness in one-loop quantum cosmology
The quantization of closed cosmologies makes it necessary to study squared
Dirac operators on closed intervals and the corresponding quantum amplitudes.
This paper proves self-adjointness of these second-order elliptic operators.Comment: 14 pages, plain Tex. An Erratum has been added to the end, which
corrects section
The standard and degenerate primordial nucleosynthesis versus recent experimental data
We report the results on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) based on an updated
code, with accuracy of the order of 0.1% on He4 abundance, compared with the
predictions of other recent similar analysis. We discuss the compatibility of
the theoretical results, for vanishing neutrino chemical potentials, with the
observational data. Bounds on the number of relativistic neutrinos and baryon
abundance are obtained by a likelihood analysis. We also analyze the effect of
large neutrino chemical potentials on primordial nucleosynthesis, motivated by
the recent results on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation spectrum. The
BBN exclusion plots for electron neutrino chemical potential and the effective
number of relativistic neutrinos are reported. We find that the standard BBN
seems to be only marginally in agreement with the recent BOOMERANG and MAXIMA-1
results, while the agreement is much better for degenerate BBN scenarios for
large effective number of neutrinos, N_\nu \sim 10.Comment: LaTeX2e, 41 pages, 20 figures. Minor changes and 4 figures slightly
modifie
Euclidean Maxwell Theory in the Presence of Boundaries. II
Zeta-function regularization is applied to complete a recent analysis of the
quantized electromagnetic field in the presence of boundaries. The quantum
theory is studied by setting to zero on the boundary the magnetic field, the
gauge-averaging functional and hence the Faddeev-Popov ghost field. Electric
boundary conditions are also studied. On considering two gauge functionals
which involve covariant derivatives of the 4-vector potential, a series of
detailed calculations shows that, in the case of flat Euclidean 4-space bounded
by two concentric 3-spheres, one-loop quantum amplitudes are gauge independent
and their mode-by-mode evaluation agrees with the covariant formulae for such
amplitudes and coincides for magnetic or electric boundary conditions. By
contrast, if a single 3-sphere boundary is studied, one finds some
inconsistencies, i.e. gauge dependence of the amplitudes.Comment: 24 pages, plain-tex, recently appearing in Classical and Quantum
Gravity, volume 11, pages 2939-2950, December 1994. The authors apologize for
the delay in circulating the file, due to technical problems now fixe
One-Loop Effective Action for Euclidean Maxwell Theory on Manifolds with Boundary
This paper studies the one-loop effective action for Euclidean Maxwell theory
about flat four-space bounded by one three-sphere, or two concentric
three-spheres. The analysis relies on Faddeev-Popov formalism and
-function regularization, and the Lorentz gauge-averaging term is used
with magnetic boundary conditions. The contributions of transverse,
longitudinal and normal modes of the electromagnetic potential, jointly with
ghost modes, are derived in detail. The most difficult part of the analysis
consists in the eigenvalue condition given by the determinant of a
or matrix for longitudinal and normal modes. It is shown that the
former splits into a sum of Dirichlet and Robin contributions, plus a simpler
term. This is the quantum cosmological case. In the latter case, however, when
magnetic boundary conditions are imposed on two bounding three-spheres, the
determinant is more involved. Nevertheless, it is evaluated explicitly as well.
The whole analysis provides the building block for studying the one-loop
effective action in covariant gauges, on manifolds with boundary. The final
result differs from the value obtained when only transverse modes are
quantized, or when noncovariant gauges are used.Comment: 25 pages, Revte
New Developments in the Spectral Asymptotics of Quantum Gravity
A vanishing one-loop wave function of the Universe in the limit of small
three-geometry is found, on imposing diffeomorphism-invariant boundary
conditions on the Euclidean 4-ball in the de Donder gauge. This result suggests
a quantum avoidance of the cosmological singularity driven by full
diffeomorphism invariance of the boundary-value problem for one-loop quantum
theory. All of this is made possible by a peculiar spectral cancellation on the
Euclidean 4-ball, here derived and discussed.Comment: 7 pages, latex file. Paper prepared for the Conference "QFEXT05:
Quantum Field Theory Under the Influence of External Conditions", Barcelona,
September 5 - September 9, 2005. In the final version, the presentation has
been further improved, and yet other References have been adde
Improved Action Functionals in Non-Perturbative Quantum Gravity
Models of gravity with variable G and Lambda have acquired greater relevance
after the recent evidence in favour of the Einstein theory being
non-perturbatively renormalizable in the Weinberg sense. The present paper
builds a modified Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) action functional for such models
which leads to a power-law growth of the scale factor for pure gravity and for
a massless phi**4 theory in a Universe with Robertson-Walker symmetry, in
agreement with the recently developed fixed-point cosmology. Interestingly, the
renormalization-group flow at the fixed point is found to be compatible with a
Lagrangian description of the running quantities G and Lambda.Comment: Latex file. Record without file already exists on SLAC-SPIRES, and
hence that record and the one for the present arxiv submission should become
one record onl
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