Child Universes in the Laboratory

Although cosmology is usually considered an observational science, where there is little or no space for experimentation, other approaches can (and have been) also considered. In particular, we can change rather drastically the above, more passive, observational perspective and ask the following question: could it be possible, and how, to create a universe in a laboratory? As a matter of fact, this seems to be possible, according to at least two different paradigms; both of them help to evade the consequences of singularity theorems. In this contribution we will review some of these models and we will also discuss possible extensions and generalizations, by paying a critical attention to the still open issues as, for instance, the detectability of child universes and the properties of quantum tunnelling processes.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the "9th Workshop on what comes beyond the standard model", Bled, Slovenia, September 16-26, 2006. LaTe

Unified Dark Energy-Dark Matter model with Inverse Quintessence

We consider a model where both dark energy and dark matter originate from the coupling of a scalar field with a non-conventional kinetic term to, both, a metric measure and a non-metric measure. An interacting dark energy/dark matter scenario can be obtained by introducing an additional scalar that can produce non constant vacuum energy and associated variations in dark matter. The phenomenology is most interesting when the kinetic term of the additional scalar field is ghost-type, since in this case the dark energy vanishes in the early universe and then grows with time. This constitutes an "inverse quintessence scenario", where the universe starts from a zero vacuum energy density state, instead of approaching it in the future.Comment: 13 pages; minor changes with references adde

Axions and Photons In Terms of "Particles" and "Anti-Particles"

The axion photon system in an external magnetic field, when for example considered with the geometry of the experiments exploring axion photon mixing (which can be represented by a 1+1 effective model) displays a continuous axion-photon duality symmetry in the limit the axion mass is neglected. The conservation law that follows from this symmetry is obtained. The magnetic field interaction is seen to be equivalent to first order to the interaction of a complex charged field with an external electric potential, where this ficticious "electric potential" is proportional to the external magnetic field. This allows one to solve for the scattering amplitudes using already known scalar QED results. Axion photon oscillations can be understood as violations of a charge symmetry in the scalar QED language. Going beyond the linear theory, the axion photon system in a self consistent magnetic field is shown, using this formalism, to have interesting soliton solutions that represent new non gravitational ways of trapping light. Finally, generalizing the scalar QED formalism to 2+1 dimensions makes it clear that a photon and an axion splitt into two components in an inhomogeneous magnetic field, an effect that reminds us of the Stern Gerlach experiment.Comment: Talk given at the 4th Patras workshop on axions, WIMPs and WISPs, Hamburg, Gemany, 18-21 Jun 2008. Corrected reference in version

Radio-loud Magnetars as Detectors for Axions and Axion-like Particles

We show that, by studying the arrival times of radio pulses from highly-magnetized transient beamed sources, it may be possible to detect light pseudo-scalar particles, such as axions and axion-like particles, whose existence could have considerable implications for the strong-CP problem of QCD as well as the dark matter problem in cosmology. Specifically, such light bosons may be detected with a much greater sensitivity, over a broad particle mass range, than is currently achievable by terrestrial experiments, and using indirect astrophysical considerations. The observable effect was discussed in Chelouche & Guendelman (2009), and is akin to the Stern-Gerlach experiment: the splitting of a photon beam naturally arises when finite coupling exists between the electro-magnetic field and the axion field. The splitting angle of the light beams linearly depends on the photon wavelength, the size of the magnetized region, and the magnetic field gradient in the transverse direction to the propagation direction of the photons. If radio emission in radio-loud magnetars is beamed and originates in regions with strong magnetic field gradients, then splitting of individual pulses may be detectable. We quantify the effect for a simplified model for magnetars, and search for radio beam splitting in the 2\,GHz radio light curves of the radio loud magnetar XTE\,J1810-197.Comment: 9 page

Scalar gauge fields

In this paper we give a variation of the gauge procedure which employs a scalar gauge field, $B (x)$, in addition to the usual vector gauge field, $A_\mu (x)$. We study this variant of the usual gauge procedure in the context of a complex scalar, matter field $\phi (x)$ with a U(1) symmetry. We will focus most on the case when $\phi$ develops a vacuum expectation value via spontaneous symmetry breaking. We find that under these conditions the scalar gauge field mixes with the Goldstone boson that arises from the breaking of a global symmetry. Some other interesting features of this scalar gauge model are: (i) The new gauge procedure gives rise to terms which violate C and CP symmetries. This may have have applications in cosmology or for CP violation in particle physics; (ii) the existence of mass terms in the Lagrangian which respect the new extended gauge symmetry. Thus one can have gauge field mass terms even in the absence of the usual Higgs mechanism; (iii) the emergence of a sine-Gordon potential for the scalar gauge field; (iv) a natural, axion-like suppression of the interaction strength of the scalar gauge boson.Comment: 15 pages RevTex, no figures; minor corrections, to be published in JHE