Comment on "Accelerating cosmological expansion from shear and bulk viscosity"

In a recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 114 091301 (2105)] the cause of the acceleration of the present Universe has been identified with the shear viscosity of an imperfect relativistic fluid even in the absence of any bulk viscous contribution. The gist of this comment is that the shear viscosity, if anything, can only lead to an accelerated expansion over sufficiently small scales well inside the Hubble radius

Stochastic GW backgrounds and Ground based detectors

The interplay between different ground based detectors and stochastic backgrounds of relic GW is described. A simultaneous detection of GW in the kHz and in the MHz--GHz region can point towards a cosmological nature of the signal. The sensitivity of a pair of VIRGO detectors to string cosmological models is presented. The implications of microwave cavities for stochastic GW backgrounds are discussed.Comment: 4 pages in Latex style, one figur

Cosmic backgrounds of relic gravitons and their absolute normalization

Provided the consistency relations are not violated, the recent Bicep2 observations pin down the absolute normalization, the spectral slope and the maximal frequency of the cosmic graviton background produced during inflation. The properly normalized spectra are hereby computed from the lowest frequencies (of the order of the present Hubble rate) up to the highest frequency range in the GHz region. Deviations from the conventional paradigm cannot be excluded and are examined by allowing for different physical possibilities including, in particular, a running of the tensor spectral index, an explicit breaking of the consistency relations and a spike in the high-frequency tail of the spectrum coming either from a post-inflationary phase dominated by a stiff fluid of from the contribution of waterfall fields in a hybrid inflationary context. The direct determinations of the tensor to scalar ratio at low frequencies, if confirmed by the forthcoming observations, will also affect and constrain the high-frequencies uncertainties. The limits on the cosmic graviton backgrounds coming from wide-band interferometers (such as Ligo/Virgo, Lisa and Bbo/Decigo) together with a more accurate scrutiny of the tensor B mode polarization at low frequencies will set direct bounds on the post-inflationary evolution and on other unconventional completions of the standard lore.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figures; to appear in Classical and Quantum Gravit

Magnetized birefringence and CMB polarization

The polarization plane of the cosmic microwave background radiation can be rotated either in a magnetized plasma or in the presence of a quintessential background with pseudoscalar coupling to electromagnetism. A unified treatment of these two phenomena is presented for cold and warm electron-ion plasmas at the pre-recombination epoch. The electron temperature is only relevant to the relativistic correction of the cold plasma results. The spectrum of plasma excitations is obtained from a generalized Appleton--Hartree equation, describing simultaneously the high-frequency propagation of electromagnetic waves in a magnetized plasma with a dynamical quintessence field. It is shown that these two effects are comparable for the plausible range of parameters allowed by present constraints. It is then argued that the generalized expressions derived in the present study may be relevant for direct searches of a possible rotation of the cosmic microwave background polarization.Comment: 9 pages; corrected typos, references adde

Stringy bounces and gradient instabilities

Bouncing solutions are obtained from a generally covariant action characterized by a potential which is a nonlocal functional of the dilaton field at two separated space-time points. Gradient instabilities are shown to arise in this context but they are argued to be nongeneric. After performing a gauge-invariant and frame-invariant derivation of the evolution equations of the fluctuations, a heuristic criterion for the avoidance of pathological instabilities is proposed and corroborated by a number of explicit examples that turn out to be compatible with a quasi-flat spectrum of curvature inhomogeneities for typical wavelengths larger than the Hubble radius.Comment: 25 pages; comments added and corrected typos; to appear in Phys. Rev.

Anomalous Magnetohydrodynamics

Anomalous symmetries induce currents which can be parallel rather than orthogonal to the hypermagnetic field. Building on the analogy with charged liquids at high magnetic Reynolds numbers, the persistence of anomalous currents is scrutinized for parametrically large conductivities when the plasma approximation is accurate. Different examples in globally neutral systems suggest that the magnetic configurations minimizing the energy density with the constraint that the helicity be conserved coincide, in the perfectly conducting limit, with the ones obtainable in ideal magnetohydrodynamics where the anomalous currents are neglected. It is argued that this is the rationale for the ability of extending to anomalous magnetohydrodynamics the hydromagnetic solutions characterized by finite gyrotropy. The generally covariant aspects of the problem are addressed with particular attention to conformally flat geometries which are potentially relevant for the description of the electroweak plasma prior to the phase transition.Comment: 25 pages, no figure

Primordial magnetic fields

Large scale magnetic fields represent a triple point where cosmology, high-energy physics and astrophysics meet for different but related purposes. After reviewing the implications of large scale magnetic fields in these different areas, the role of primordial magnetic fields is discussed in various physical processes occurring prior to the decoupling epoch with particular attention to the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) epoch and to the electroweak (EW) epoch. The generation of matter--antimatter isocurvature fluctuations, induced by hypermagnetic fields, is analyzed in light of a possible increase of extra-relativistic species at BBN. It is argued that stochastic GW backgrounds can be generated by hypermagnetic fields at the LISA frequency. The problem of the origin of large scale magnetic fields is also scrutinized.Comment: 41 pages in Latex style, 5 figure

Fluctuations of inflationary magnetogenesis

This analysis aims at exploring what can be said about the growth rate of magnetized inhomogeneities under two concurrent hypotheses: a phase of quasi-de Sitter dynamics driven by a single inflaton field and the simultaneous presence of a spectator field coupled to gravity and to the gauge sector. Instead of invoking ad hoc correlations between the various components, the system of scalar inhomogeneities is diagonalized in terms of two gauge-invariant quasi-normal modes whose weighted sum gives the curvature perturbations on comoving orthogonal hypersurfaces. The predominance of the conventional adiabatic scalar mode implies that the growth rate of magnetized inhomogeneities must not exceed 2.2 in Hubble units if the conventional inflationary phase is to last about 70 efolds and for a range of slow roll parameters between 0.1 and 0.001. Longer and shorter durations of the quasi-de Sitter stage lead, respectively, either to tighter or to looser bounds which are anyway more constraining than the standard backreaction demands imposed on the gauge sector. Since a critical growth rate of order 2 leads to a quasi-flat magnetic energy spectrum, the upper bounds on the growth rate imply a lower bound on the magnetic spectral index. The advantages of the uniform curvature gauge are emphasized and specifically exploited throughout the treatment of the multicomponent system characterizing this class of problems.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figure

Faraday scaling and the Bicep2 observations

As repeatedly speculated in the past, the linear polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background can be rotated via the Faraday effect. An economic explanation of the recent Bicep2 observations, not relying on long-wavelength tensor modes of the geometry, would stipulate that the detected B mode comes exclusively from a Faraday rotated E mode polarization. We show hereunder that this interpretation is ruled out by the existing upper limits on the B mode polarization obtained by independent experiments at observational frequencies much lower than the operating frequency of the Bicep2 experiment. We then derive the fraction of the observed B mode polarization ascribable to the Faraday effect and suggest a dedicated experimental strategy for its detection.Comment: 8 pages, no figure

Viscous modes, isocurvature perturbations and CMB initial conditions

When the predecoupling plasma is thermodynamically reversible its fluctuations are classified in terms of the adiabatic and entropic modes. A different category of physical solutions, so far unexplored, arises when the inhomogeneities of the viscosity coefficients induce computable curvature perturbations. The viscous modes are explicitly illustrated and compared with the conventional isocurvature solutions.Comment: 9 pages, no figures; corrected typos; to appear in Physical Review as a Rapid Communicatio