arXiv subjects

Adrià Gómez-Valent

Publications and source records attributed to Adrià Gómez-Valent.

40 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Density perturbations for running vacuum: a successful approach to structure formation and to the $σ_8$-tension

Recent studies suggest that dynamical dark energy (DDE) provides a better fit to the rising affluence of modern cosmological observations than the concordance model ($Λ$CDM) with a rigid cosmological constant, $Λ$. Such is the case with the running vacuum models (RVMs) and to some extent also with a simple XCDM parametrization. Apart from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies, the most crucial datasets potentially carrying the DDE signature are: i) baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO), and ii) direct large scale structure (LSS) formation data (i.e. the observations on $f(z)σ_8(z)$ at different redshifts). As it turns out, analyses mainly focusing on CMB and with insufficient BAO+LSS input, or those just making use of gravitational weak-lensing data for the description of structure formation, generally fail to capture the DDE signature, whereas the few existing studies using a rich set of CMB+BAO+LSS data (see in particular Solà, Gómez-Valent & de Cruz Pérez 2015,2017; and Zhao et al. 2017) do converge to the remarkable conclusion that DDE might well be encoded in the current cosmological observations. Being the issue so pressing, here we explain both analytically and numerically the origin of the possible hints of DDE in the context of RVMs, which arise at a significance level of $3-4σ$. By performing a detailed study on the matter and vacuum perturbations within the RVMs, and comparing with the XCDM, we show why the running vacuum fully relaxes the existing $σ_8$-tension and accounts for the LSS formation data much better than the concordance model.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

$H_0$ from cosmic chronometers and Type Ia supernovae, with Gaussian Processes and the novel Weighted Polynomial Regression method

In this paper we present new constraints on the Hubble parameter $H_0$ using: (i) the available data on $H(z)$ obtained from cosmic chronometers (CCH); (ii) the Hubble rate data points extracted from the supernovae of Type Ia (SnIa) of the Pantheon compilation and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) CANDELS and CLASH Multy-Cycle Treasury (MCT) programs; and (iii) the local HST measurement of $H_0$ provided by Riess et al. (2018), $H_0^{\rm HST}=(73.45\pm1.66)$ km/s/Mpc. Various determinations of $H_0$ using the Gaussian processes (GPs) method and the most updated list of CCH data have been recently provided by Yu, Ratra and Wang (2018). Using the Gaussian kernel they find $H_0=(67.42\pm 4.75)$ km/s/Mpc. Here we extend their analysis to also include the most released and complete set of SnIa data, which allows us to reduce the uncertainty by a factor $\sim 3$ with respect to the result found by only considering the CCH information. We obtain $H_0=(67.06\pm 1.68)$ km/s/Mpc, which favors again the lower range of values for $H_0$ and is in tension with $H_0^{\rm HST}$. The tension reaches the $2.71σ$ level. We round off the GPs determination too by taking also into account the error propagation of the kernel hyperparameters when the CCH with and without $H_0^{\rm HST}$ are used in the analysis. In addition, we present a novel method to reconstruct functions from data, which consists in a weighted sum of polynomial regressions (WPR). We apply it from a cosmographic perspective to reconstruct $H(z)$ and estimate $H_0$ from CCH and SnIa measurements. The result obtained with this method, $H_0=(68.90\pm 1.96)$ km/s/Mpc, is fully compatible with the GPs ones. Finally, a more conservative GPs+WPR value is also provided, $H_0=(68.45\pm 2.00)$ km/s/Mpc, which is still almost $2σ$ away from $H_0^{\rm HST}$.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Vacuum energy in Quantum Field Theory and Cosmology

In this thesis we present detailed analyses on various running vacuum models (RVM's), in which the vacuum energy density "runs" with the cosmic expansion. The RVM's are motivated from the renormalization group formalism of Quantum Field Theory in curved spacetime. In this theoretical framework, the vacuum energy density depends explicitly on the Hubble function and its time derivative and thus does not remain constant, in contradistinction to the standard $Λ$CDM picture. Upon studying how these models fit the data, we can determine whether this dynamical behavior is favored by observations or not. Is the vacuum energy density (or more generically, the DE density) dynamical? One of the main conclusions of this dissertation is that we have indeed strong evidences in favor of the variability of the DE density throughout the cosmic history. It is shown that this variation can also be traced through other (purely phenomenological) dynamical vacuum models, together with different parametrizations of the DE (as the XCDM and CPL), and scalar field models as the Peebles-Ratra one. The statistical confidence level of these evidences reaches in some cases the 3-4$σ$ c.l., something that is unprecedented in the literature. An exhaustive explanation of the reasons why large collaborations as BOSS, Planck and DES have not been able to detect such signal in favor of the DE dynamics is provided in this thesis too.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2016

Running vacuum versus the $Λ$CDM

It is well-known that a constant $Λ$-term is a traditional building block of the concordance $Λ$CDM model. We show that this assumption is not necessarily the optimal one from the phenomenological point of view. The class of running vacuum models, with a possible running of the gravitational coupling G, are capable to fit the overall cosmological data SNIa+BAO+H(z)+LSS+BBN+CMB better than the $Λ$CDM, namely at a level of $\sim 3σ$ and with Akaike and Bayesian information criteria supporting a strong level of statistical evidence on this fact. Here we report on the results of such analysis.

gr-qc↗