On the coupling between spinning particles and cosmological gravitational waves

The influence of spin in a system of classical particles on the propagation of gravitational waves is analyzed in the cosmological context of primordial thermal equilibrium. On a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric, when the precession is neglected, there is no contribution due to the spin to the distribution function of the particles. Adding a small tensor perturbation to the background metric, we study if a coupling between gravitational waves and spin exists that can modify the evolution of the distribution function, leading to new terms in the anisotropic stress, and then to a new source for gravitational waves. In the chosen gauge, the final result is that, in the absence of other kind of perturbations, there is no coupling between spin and gravitational waves.Comment: 4 pages, to appear in Proceedings of the II Stueckelberg Workshop - Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Linear and non-linear effects in structure formation

La tesi riguarda la formazione di strutture a larga scala nell'universo, cioè l'origine degli addensamenti di materia che hanno portato alla formazione dei cluster di galassie. La maggior parte del lavoro ha riguardato aspetti non lineari della Teoria delle Perturbazioni Cosmologiche, trattando in particolare il periodo di transizione tra epoca della radiazione e epoca della materia. In questo contesto si è considerato un modello non-standard di materia, analizzando il ruolo dell'indice barotropico nell'evoluzione del contrasto di densità . La nota approssimazione Meszaros è stata generalizzata ad una analisi non lineare che ha permesso di trovare la skewness della distribzione di materia, un importante indice di non-Gaussianità rilevabile dai dati osservativi. Nel contesto delle perturbazioni cosmologiche è stata formulata la teoria Post-Newtoniana (1PN) con lo scopo di ottenere un set di equazioni valido per ogni range di distanze, in particolare per le scale intermedie. I risultati finali coincidono sia con la teoria lineare relativistica per grandi scale sia con la teoria non lineare Newtoniana per piccole scale; quest'ultima connessione fornisce una chiara visione della relazione fra Relatività Generale e teoria Newtoniana.The subject matter of this thesis is the formation of large-scale structure in the universe, describing the clustering of matter in galaxies and clusters of galax- ies. Most of the study has dealt with the non-linear evolution of cosmological fluctuations, focusing on the scalar sector of perturbation theory. The period of transition between the radiation era and the matter era has been largely examined, extending the already known linear results to a non-standard matter model and to a non-linear analysis. The obtained second order solutions for the matter fluctuations variables have been used to find the skewness of the density and velocity distributions, an important statistic estimator measuring the level of non-Gaussianity of a statistic ensamble. In the contest of cosmological perturbations a complete Post-Newtonian (1PN) treatment is presented with the aim of obtain a set of equations suitable in particular for the intermediate scales. The final result agrees with both the non linear Newtonian theory of small scales and the linear general relativistic theory of large scales. Analyzing the limit cases of our approach to 1PN cosmology, we have clarified the link between the Newtonian theory of gravity and General Relativity

The missing link: a nonlinear post-Friedmann framework for small and large scales

We present a nonlinear post-Friedmann framework for structure formation, generalizing to cosmology the weak-field (post-Minkowskian) approximation, unifying the treatment of small and large scales. We consider a universe filled with a pressureless fluid and a cosmological constant \u39b , the theory of gravity is Einstein\u2019s general relativity and the background is the standard flat \u39b CDM cosmological model. We expand the metric and the energy-momentum tensor in powers of 1 / c , keeping the matter density and peculiar velocity as exact fundamental variables. We assume the Poisson gauge, including scalar and tensor modes up to 1 / c 4 order and vector modes up to 1 / c 5 terms. Through a redefinition of the scalar potentials as a resummation of the metric contributions at different orders, we obtain a complete set of nonlinear equations, providing a unified framework to study structure formation from small to superhorizon scales, from the nonlinear Newtonian to the linear relativistic regime. We explicitly show the validity of our scheme in the two limits: at leading order we recover the fully nonlinear equations of Newtonian cosmology; when linearized, our equations become those for scalar and vector modes of first-order relativistic perturbation theory in the Poisson gauge. Tensor modes are nondynamical at the 1 / c 4 order we consider (gravitational waves only appear at higher order): they are purely nonlinear and describe a distortion of the spatial slices determined at this order by a constraint, quadratic in the scalar and vector variables. The main results of our analysis are as follows: (a) at leading order a purely Newtonian nonlinear energy current sources a frame-dragging gravitomagnetic vector potential, and (b) in the leading-order Newtonian regime and in the linear relativistic regime, the two scalar metric potentials are the same, while the nonlinearity of general relativity makes them different. Possible applications of our formalism include the calculations of the vector potential [1,2] and the difference between the two scalar potentials from Newtonian N-body simulations, and the extension of Newtonian approximations used in structure formation studies, to include relativistic effects