Cosmological attractors in massive gravity

We study Lorentz-violating models of massive gravity which preserve rotations and are invariant under time-dependent shifts of the spatial coordinates. In the linear approximation the Newtonian potential in these models has an extra ``confining'' term proportional to the distance from the source. We argue that during cosmological expansion the Universe may be driven to an attractor point with larger symmetry which includes particular simultaneous dilatations of time and space coordinates. The confining term in the potential vanishes as one approaches the attractor. In the vicinity of the attractor the extra contribution is present in the Friedmann equation which, in a certain range of parameters, gives rise to the cosmic acceleration.Comment: 26 pages, 1 figur

Estimate of the correlation signal between cosmic rays and BL Lacs in future data

The existing correlation between BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs) and cosmic-ray events observed by HiRes experiment provide sufficient information to formulate quantitatively the hypothesis about the flux of neutral cosmic-ray particles originated from BL Lacs. We determine the potential of future cosmic ray experiments to test this hypothesis by predicting the number of coincidences between arrival directions of cosmic rays and positions of BL Lacs on the celestial sphere, which should be observed in the future datasets. We find that the early Pierre Auger data will not have enough events to address this question. On the contrary, the final Pierre Auger data and the early Telescope Array data will be sufficient to fully test this hypothesis. If confirmed, it would imply the existence of highest-energy neutral particles coming from cosmological distances.Comment: 5 page

Violation of Lorentz Invariance and neutral component of UHECR

The observed clustering of ultra-high energy cosmic rays suggests the existence of a neutral component. The models with violation of Lorentz invariance may explain this component by neutrons becoming stable above some threshold energy E_0. The protons, in turn, may become unstable above some energy E_1>E_0. We calculate the dependence of the threshold energies E_0 and E_1 on the parameters of the model and find E_1/E_0\gsim 1.5. We argue that the characteristic threshold behavior of charged and neutral components may be used as the specific signature of models with violation of Lorentz invariance. The existence of the neutron stability threshold E_0 can be investigated with already existing data.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure

Quantum Dew

We consider phase separation in nonequilibrium Bose gas with an attractive interaction between the particles. Using numerical integrations on a lattice, we show that the system evolves into a state that contains drops of Bose-Einstein condensate suspended in uncondensed gas. When the initial gas is sufficiently rarefied, the rate of formation of this quantum dew scales with the initial density as expected for a process governed by two-particle collisions.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, 5 figure

Evidence for a connection between the gamma-ray and the highest energy cosmic-ray emissions by BL Lacertae objects

A set of potentially gamma-ray--loud BL Lac objects is selected by intersecting the EGRET and BL Lac catalogs. Of the resulting 14 objects, eight are found to correlate with arrival directions of ultra--high-energy cosmic rays (UHECRs), with significance of the order of 5 sigma. This suggests that gamma-ray emission can be used as a distinctive feature of those BL Lac objects that are capable of producing UHECR.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, version published in APJ Letter

First-order nonthermal phase transition after preheating

During preheating after inflation, parametric resonance rapidly generates very large fluctuations of scalar fields. In models where the inflaton field $\phi$ oscillates in a double-well potential and interacts with another scalar field $X$, fluctuations of X can keep the \phi to -\phi symmetry temporarily restored. If the coupling of \phi to X is much stronger than the inflaton self-coupling, the subsequent symmetry breaking is a first-order phase transition. We demonstrate the existence of this nonthermal phase transition with lattice simulations of the full nonlinear dynamics of the interacting fields. In particular, we observe nucleation of an expanding bubble.Comment: RevTeX, 4 page

Testing the correlations between ultra-high-energy cosmic rays and BL Lac type objects with HiRes stereoscopic data

Previously suggested correlations of BL Lac type objects with the arrival directions of the ultra-high-energy cosmic ray primaries are tested by making use of the HiRes stereoscopic data. The results of the study support the conclusion that BL Lacs may be the cosmic ray sources and suggest the presence of a small (a few percent) fraction of neutral primaries at E>10^{19} eV.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure