317 research outputs found
Planck 2018 results:I. Overview and the cosmological legacy of Planck
The European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which was dedicated to studying the early Universe and its subsequent evolution, was launched on 14 May 2009. It scanned the microwave and submillimetre sky continuously between 12 August 2009 and 23 October 2013, producing deep, high-resolution, all-sky maps in nine frequency bands from 30 to 857 GHz. This paper presents the cosmological legacy of Planck, which currently provides our strongest constraints on the parameters of the standard cosmological model and some of the tightest limits available on deviations from that model. The 6-parameter ΛCDM model continues to provide an excellent fit to the cosmic microwave background data at high and low redshift, describing the cosmological information in over a billion map pixels with just six parameters. With 18 peaks in the temperature and polarization angular power spectra constrained well, Planck measures five of the six parameters to better than 1% (simultaneously), with the best-determined parameter (θ∗) now known to 0.03%. We describe the multi-component sky as seen by Planck, the success of the ΛCDM model, and the connection to lower-redshift probes of structure formation. We also give a comprehensive summary of the major changes introduced in this 2018 release. The Planck data, alone and in combination with other probes, provide stringent constraints on our models of the early Universe and the large-scale structure within which all astrophysical objects form and evolve. We discuss some lessons learned from the Planck mission, and highlight areas ripe for further experimental advances.</p
Searching for Oscillations in the Primordial Power Spectrum: Perturbative Approach (Paper I)
In this first of two papers, we present a new method for searching for
oscillatory features in the primordial power spectrum. A wide variety of models
predict these features in one of two different flavors: logarithmically spaced
oscillations and linearly spaced oscillations. The proposed method treats the
oscillations as perturbations on top of the scale-invariant power spectrum,
allowing us to vary all cosmological parameters. This perturbative approach
reduces the computational requirements for the search as the transfer functions
and their derivatives can be precomputed. We show that the most significant
degeneracy in the analysis is between the distance to last scattering and the
overall amplitude at low frequencies. For models with logarithmic oscillations,
this degeneracy leads to an uncertainty in the phase. For linear spaced
oscillations, it affects the frequency of the oscillations. In this first of
two papers, we test our code on simulated Planck-like data, and show we are
able to recover fiducial input oscillations with an amplitude of a few times
order 10^{-2}. We apply the code to WMAP9-year data and confirm the existence
of two intriguing resonant frequencies for log spaced oscillations. For linear
spaced oscillations we find a single resonance peak. We use numerical
simulations to assess the significance of these features and conclude that the
data do not provide compelling evidence for the existence of oscillatory
features in the primordial spectrum.Comment: 13 pages, 22 figures. Paper 1 of 2. Fixed typos, added reference
Oscillations in the bispectrum
There exist several models of inflation that produce primordial bispectra
that contain a large number of oscillations. In this paper we discuss these
models, and aim at finding a method of detecting such bispectra in the data. We
explain how the recently proposed method of mode expansion of bispectra might
be able to reconstruct these spectra from separable basis functions. Extracting
these basis functions from the data might then lead to observational
constraints on these models.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, submitted to JOP: Conference Series, PASCOS 201
An optimal estimator for resonance bispectra in the CMB
We propose an (optimal) estimator for a CMB bispectrum containing
logarithmically spaced oscillations. There is tremendous theoretical interest
in such bispectra, and they are predicted by a plethora of models, including
axion monodromy models of inflation and initial state modifications. The number
of resolved logarithmical oscillations in the bispectrum is limited due to the
discrete resolution of the multipole bispectrum. We derive a simple relation
between the maximum number of resolved oscillations and the frequency. We
investigate several ways to factorize the primordial bispectrum, and conclude
that a one dimensional expansion in the sum of the momenta is
the most efficient and flexible approach. We compare the expansion to the exact
result in multipole space and show for that
modes are sufficient for an accurate reconstruction. We
compute the expected and find that within an effective
field theory (EFT) the overall signal to noise scales as . Using only the temperature data we find
for the frequency domain set by the EFT.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figure
Enhanced local-type inflationary trispectrum from a non-vacuum initial state
We compute the primordial trispectrum for curvature perturbations produced
during cosmic inflation in models with standard kinetic terms, when the initial
quantum state is not necessarily the vacuum state. The presence of initial
perturbations enhances the trispectrum amplitude for configuration in which one
of the momenta, say , is much smaller than the others, . For those squeezed configurations the trispectrum acquires the
so-called local form, with a scale dependent amplitude that can get values of
order . This amplitude can be larger than the
prediction of the so-called Maldacena consistency relation by a factor ,
and can reach the sensitivity of forthcoming observations, even for
single-field inflationary models.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure. References added, typos corrected, minor change
An Inner Gaseous Disk around the Herbig Be Star MWC 147
We present high-spectral-resolution, optical spectra of the Herbig Be star
MWC 147, in which we spectrally resolve several emission lines, including the
[O I] lines at 6300 and 6363\deg. Their highly symmetric, double-peaked line
profiles indicate that the emission originates in a rotating circumstellar
disk. We deconvolve the Doppler-broadened [O I] emission lines to obtain a
measure of emission as a function of distance from the central star. The
resulting radial surface brightness profiles are in agreement with a disk
structure consisting of a flat, inner, gaseous disk and a flared, outer, dust
disk. The transition between these components at 2 to 3 AU corresponds to the
estimated dust sublimation radius. The width of the double-peaked Mg II line at
4481\deg suggests that the inner disk extends to at least 0.10 AU, close to the
corotation radius.Comment: accepted for ApJ Letters (Oct. 2010
Effects of Nonlinear Dispersion Relations on Non-Gaussianities
We investigate the effect of non-linear dispersion relations on the
bispectrum. In particular, we study the case were the modified relations do not
violate the WKB condition at early times, focusing on a particular example
which is exactly solvable: the Jacobson-Corley dispersion relation with quartic
correction with positive coefficient to the squared linear relation. We find
that the corrections to the standard result for the bispectrum are suppressed
by a factor where is the scale where the modification
to the dispersion relation becomes relevant. The modification is {\it mildly}
configuration-dependent and equilateral configurations are more suppressed with
respect to the local ones, by a factor of one percent. There is no
configuration leading to enhancements. We then analyze the results in the
framework of particle creation using the approximate gluing method of
Brandenberger and Martin, which relates more directly to the modeling of the
trans-Planckian physics via modifications of the vacuum at a certain cutoff
scale. We show that the gluing method overestimates the leading order
correction to the spectrum and bispectrum by one and two orders, respectively,
in . We discuss the various approximation and conclude that for
dispersion relations not violating WKB at early times the particle creation is
small and does not lead to enhanced contributions to the bispectrum. We also
show that in many cases enhancements do not occur when modeling the
trans-Planckian physics via modifications of the vacuum at a certain cutoff
scale. Most notably they are only of order O(1) when the Bogolyubov
coefficients accounting for particle creation are determined by the Wronskian
condition and the minimization of the uncertainty between the field and its
conjugate momentum.Comment: v1: 11 pages, 2 figures; v2: references update
Density reconstruction from biased tracers and its application to primordial non-Gaussianity
Large-scale Fourier modes of the cosmic density field are of great value for
learning about cosmology because of their well-understood relationship to
fluctuations in the early universe. However, cosmic variance generally limits
the statistical precision that can be achieved when constraining model
parameters using these modes as measured in galaxy surveys, and moreover, these
modes are sometimes inaccessible due to observational systematics or
foregrounds. For some applications, both limitations can be circumvented by
reconstructing large-scale modes using the correlations they induce between
smaller-scale modes of an observed tracer (such as galaxy positions). In this
paper, we further develop a formalism for this reconstruction, using a
quadratic estimator similar to the one used for lensing of the cosmic microwave
background. We incorporate nonlinearities from gravity, nonlinear biasing, and
local-type primordial non-Gaussianity, and verify that the estimator gives the
expected results when applied to N-body simulations. We then carry out
forecasts for several upcoming surveys, demonstrating that, when reconstructed
modes are included alongside directly-observed tracer density modes,
constraints on local primordial non-Gaussianity are generically tightened by
tens of percents compared to standard single-tracer analyses. In certain cases,
these improvements arise from cosmic variance cancellation, with reconstructed
modes taking the place of modes of a separate tracer, thus enabling an
effective "multitracer" approach with single-tracer observations.Comment: 30 pages plus 14 pages appendices, 19 figure
Holographic Non-Gaussianity
We investigate the non-Gaussianity of primordial cosmological perturbations
within our recently proposed holographic description of inflationary universes.
We derive a holographic formula that determines the bispectrum of cosmological
curvature perturbations in terms of correlation functions of a holographically
dual three-dimensional non-gravitational quantum field theory (QFT). This
allows us to compute the primordial bispectrum for a universe which started in
a non-geometric holographic phase, using perturbative QFT calculations.
Strikingly, for a class of models specified by a three-dimensional
super-renormalisable QFT, the primordial bispectrum is of exactly the
factorisable equilateral form with f_nl^eq=5/36, irrespective of the details of
the dual QFT. A by-product of this investigation is a holographic formula for
the three-point function of the trace of the stress-energy tensor along general
holographic RG flows, which should have applications outside the remit of this
work.Comment: 42 pages, 2 figs, published versio
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