545 research outputs found
Life, The Universe, and Nothing: Life and Death in an Ever-Expanding Universe
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that
we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under
these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is
cosmological constant-dominated, our ability to probe the evolution of large
scale structure will decrease with time ---presently observable distant sources
will disappear on a time-scale comparable to the period of stellar burning.
Moreover, while the Universe might expand forever, the integrated conscious
lifetime of any civilization will be finite, although it can be astronomically
long. We find that this latter result is far more general. In the absence of
possible exotic and uncertain strong gravitational effects, the total
information recoverable by any civilization over the entire history of our
universe is finite, and assuming that consciousness has a physical
computational basis, life cannot be eternal.Comment: 23 pages, latex, submitted to Ap.
Universal Limits on Computation
The physical limits to computation have been under active scrutiny over the
past decade or two, as theoretical investigations of the possible impact of
quantum mechanical processes on computing have begun to make contact with
realizable experimental configurations. We demonstrate here that the observed
acceleration of the Universe can produce a universal limit on the total amount
of information that can be stored and processed in the future, putting an
ultimate limit on future technology for any civilization, including a
time-limit on Moore's Law. The limits we derive are stringent, and include the
possibilities that the computing performed is either distributed or local. A
careful consideration of the effect of horizons on information processing is
necessary for this analysis, which suggests that the total amount of
information that can be processed by any observer is significantly less than
the Hawking-Bekenstein entropy associated with the existence of an event
horizon in an accelerating universe.Comment: 3 pages including eps figure, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett; several
typos corrected, several references added, and a short discussion of w <-1
adde
Macro Dark Matter
Dark matter is a vital component of the current best model of our universe,
CDM. There are leading candidates for what the dark matter could be
(e.g. weakly-interacting massive particles, or axions), but no compelling
observational or experimental evidence exists to support these particular
candidates, nor any beyond-the-Standard-Model physics that might produce such
candidates. This suggests that other dark matter candidates, including ones
that might arise in the Standard Model, should receive increased attention.
Here we consider a general class of dark matter candidates with characteristic
masses and interaction cross-sections characterized in units of grams and
cm, respectively -- we therefore dub these macroscopic objects as Macros.
Such dark matter candidates could potentially be assembled out of Standard
Model particles (quarks and leptons) in the early universe. A combination of
Earth-based, astrophysical, and cosmological observations constrain a portion
of the Macro parameter space. A large region of parameter space remains, most
notably for nuclear-dense objects with masses in the range g and
g, although the lower mass window is closed
for Macros that destabilize ordinary matter.Comment: 13 pages, 1 table, 4 figures. Submitted to MNRAS. v3: corrected small
errors and a few points were made more clear, v4: included CMB bounds on dark
matter-photon coupling from Wilkinson et al. (2014) and references added.
Final revision matches published versio
Parameterization of Dark-Energy Properties: a Principal-Component Approach
Considerable work has been devoted to the question of how to best
parameterize the properties of dark energy, in particular its equation of state
w. We argue that, in the absence of a compelling model for dark energy, the
parameterizations of functions about which we have no prior knowledge, such as
w(z), should be determined by the data rather than by our ingrained beliefs or
familiar series expansions. We find the complete basis of orthonormal
eigenfunctions in which the principal components (weights of w(z)) that are
determined most accurately are separated from those determined most poorly.
Furthermore, we show that keeping a few of the best-measured modes can be an
effective way of obtaining information about w(z).Comment: Unfeasibility of a truly model-independent reconstruction of w at z>1
illustrated. f(z) left out, and w(z) discussed in more detail. Matches the
PRL versio
Brane Localization and Stabilization via Regional Physics
Extra-dimensional scenarios have become widespread among particle and
gravitational theories of physics to address several outstanding problems,
including cosmic acceleration, the weak hierarchy problem, and the quantization
of gravity. In general, the topology and geometry of the full spacetime
manifold will be non-trivial, even if our ordinary dimensions have the topology
of their covering space. Most compact manifolds are inhomogeneous, even if they
admit a homogeneous geometry, and it will be physically relevant where in the
extra-dimensions one is located. In this letter, we explore the use of both
local and global effects in a braneworld scenario to naturally provide
position-dependent forces that determine and stabilize the location of a single
brane. For illustrative purposes, we consider the 2-dimensional hyperbolic horn
and the Euclidean cone as toy models of the extra-dimensional manifold, and add
a brane wrapped around one of the two spatial dimensions. We calculate the
total energy due to brane tension and bending (extrinsic curvature) as well as
that due to the Casimir energy of a bulk scalar satisfying a Dirchlet boundary
condition on the brane. From the competition of at least two of these effects
there can exist a stable minimum of the effective potential for the brane
location. However, on more generic spaces (on which more symmetries are broken)
any one of these effects may be sufficient to stabilize the brane. We discuss
this as an example of physics that is neither local nor global, but regional.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. PRL submitte
Retarded Green's Functions In Perturbed Spacetimes For Cosmology and Gravitational Physics
Electromagnetic and gravitational radiation do not propagate solely on the
null cone in a generic curved spacetime. They develop "tails," traveling at all
speeds equal to and less than unity. If sizeable, this off-the-null-cone effect
could mean objects at cosmological distances, such as supernovae, appear dimmer
than they really are. Their light curves may be distorted relative to their
flat spacetime counterparts. These in turn could affect how we infer the
properties and evolution of the universe or the objects it contains. Within the
gravitational context, the tail effect induces a self-force that causes a
compact object orbiting a massive black hole to deviate from an otherwise
geodesic path. This needs to be taken into account when modeling the
gravitational waves expected from such sources. Motivated by these
considerations, we develop perturbation theory for solving the massless scalar,
photon and graviton retarded Green's functions in perturbed spacetimes,
assuming these Green's functions are known in the background spacetime. In
particular, we elaborate on the theory in perturbed Minkowski spacetime in
significant detail; and apply our techniques to compute the retarded Green's
functions in the weak field limit of the Kerr spacetime to first order in the
black hole's mass and angular momentum. Our methods build on and generalizes
work appearing in the literature on this topic to date, and lays the foundation
for a thorough, first principles based, investigation of how light propagates
over cosmological distances, within a spatially flat inhomogeneous
Friedmann-Lema\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) universe. This perturbative
scheme applied to the graviton Green's function, when pushed to higher orders,
may provide approximate analytic (or semi-analytic) results for the self-force
problem in the weak field limits of the Schwarzschild and Kerr black hole
geometries.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. Significant updates in v2: Scalar, photon and
graviton Green's functions calculated explicitly in Kerr black hole spacetime
up to first order in mass and angular momentum (Sec. V); Visser's van Vleck
determinant result shown to be equivalent to ours in Sec. II. v3: JWKB
discussion moved to introduction; to be published in PR
- …