arXiv subjects

Christophe Ringeval

Publications and source records attributed to Christophe Ringeval.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Optical Follow-up of Planck Cluster Candidates with Small Instruments

We report on the search for optical counterparts of Planck Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) cluster candidates using a 0.6 meter non-professional telescope. Among the observed sources, an unconfirmed candidate, PSZ2 G156.24+22.32, is found to be associated with a region of more than 100 galaxies within a 3 arcminutes radius around the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich maximum signal coordinates. Using 14 hours of cumulated exposure over the Sloan color filters g', r', i', and, z', we estimate the photometric redshift of these galaxies at zphot=0.29 +- 0.08. Using the red-sequence galaxy method gives a photometric redshift of 0.30 +0.03 -0.05. Combined with the Planck SZ proxy mass function, this would favor a cluster of 4.4 x 10^{14} solar masses. This result suggests that a dedicated pool of observatories equipped with such instruments could collectively contribute to optical follow-up programs of massive cluster candidates at moderate redshifts.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

CMB anisotropies from patchy reionisation and diffuse Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects

Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) can be induced during the later stages of cosmic evolution, and in particular during and after the Epoch of Reionisation. Inhomogeneities in the ionised fraction, but also in the baryon density, in the velocity fields and in the gravitational potentials are expected to generate correlated CMB perturbations. We present a complete relativistic treatment of all these effects, up to second order in perturbation theory, that we solve using the numerical Boltzmann code SONG. The physical origin and relevance of all second order terms are carefully discussed. In addition to collisional and gravitational contributions, we identify the diffuse analogue of the blurring and kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effects. Our approach naturally includes the correlations between the imprint from patchy reionisation and the diffuse SZ effects thereby allowing us to derive reliable estimates of the induced temperature and polarisation CMB angular power spectra. In particular, we show that the B-modes generated at intermediate length-scales (l~100) have the same amplitude as the B-modes coming from primordial gravitational waves with a tensor-to-scalar ratio r=10^{-4}.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Stochastic gravitational waves from cosmic string loops in scaling

If cosmic strings are formed in the early universe, their associated loops emit gravitational waves during the whole cosmic history and contribute to the stochastic gravitational wave background at all frequencies. We provide a new estimate of the stochastic gravitational wave spectrum by considering a realistic cosmological loop distribution, in scaling, as it can be inferred from Nambu-Goto numerical simulations. Our result takes into account various effects neglected so far. We include both gravitational wave emission and backreaction effects on the loop distribution and show that they produce two distinct features in the spectrum. Concerning the string microstructure, in addition to the presence of cusps and kinks, we show that gravitational wave bursts created by the collision of kinks could dominate the signal for wiggly strings, a situation which may be favoured in the light of recent numerical simulations. In view of these new results, we propose four prototypical scenarios, within the margin of the remaining theoretical uncertainties, for which we derive the corresponding signal and estimate the constraints on the string tension put by both the LIGO and European Pulsar Timing Array (EPTA) observations. The less constrained of these scenarios is shown to have a string tension GU < 7.2 x 10^{-11}, at 95% of confidence. Smooth loops carrying two cusps per oscillation verify the two-sigma bound GU < 1.0 x 10^{-11} while the most constrained of all scenarios describes very kinky loops and satisfies GU < 6.7 x 10^{-14} at 95% of confidence.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE: Inflation

We forecast the scientific capabilities to improve our understanding of cosmic inflation of CORE, a proposed CMB space satellite submitted in response to the ESA fifth call for a medium-size mission opportunity. The CORE satellite will map the CMB anisotropies in temperature and polarization in 19 frequency channels spanning the range 60-600 GHz. CORE will have an aggregate noise sensitivity of $1.7 μ$K$\cdot \,$arcmin and an angular resolution of 5' at 200 GHz. We explore the impact of telescope size and noise sensitivity on the inflation science return by making forecasts for several instrumental configurations. This study assumes that the lower and higher frequency channels suffice to remove foreground contaminations and complements other related studies of component separation and systematic effects, which will be reported in other papers of the series "Exploring Cosmic Origins with CORE." We forecast the capability to determine key inflationary parameters, to lower the detection limit for the tensor-to-scalar ratio down to the $10^{-3}$ level, to chart the landscape of single field slow-roll inflationary models, to constrain the epoch of reheating, thus connecting inflation to the standard radiation-matter dominated Big Bang era, to reconstruct the primordial power spectrum, to constrain the contribution from isocurvature perturbations to the $10^{-3}$ level, to improve constraints on the cosmic string tension to a level below the presumptive GUT scale, and to improve the current measurements of primordial non-Gaussianities down to the $f_{NL}^{\rm local} < 1$ level. For all the models explored, CORE alone will improve significantly on the present constraints on the physics of inflation. Its capabilities will be further enhanced by combining with complementary future cosmological observations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2017

Shortcomings of New Parametrizations of Inflation

In the hope of avoiding model dependence of the cosmological observables, phenomenological parametrizations of Cosmic Inflation have recently been proposed. Typically, they are expressed in terms of two parameters associated with an expansion of the inflationary quantities matching the belief that inflation is characterized by two numbers only, the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the scalar spectral index. We give different arguments and examples showing that these new approaches are either not generic or insufficient to make predictions at the accuracy level needed by the cosmological data. We conclude that disconnecting inflation from high energy physics and gravity might not be the most promising way to learn about the physics of the early Universe.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Information Gain on Reheating: the One Bit Milestone

We show that the Planck 2015 and BICEP2/KECK measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies provide together an information gain of 0.82 +- 0.13 bits on the reheating history over all slow-roll single-field models of inflation. This corresponds to a 40% improvement compared to the Planck 2013 constraints on the reheating. Our method relies on an exhaustive CMB data analysis performed over nearly 200 models of inflation to derive the Kullback-Leibler entropy between the prior and the fully marginalized posterior of the reheating parameter. This number is a weighted average by the Bayesian evidence of each model to explain the data thereby ensuring its fairness and robustness.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2016

Large scale CMB anomalies from thawing cosmic strings

Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings imprint their signature in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Anisotropies after recombination. Being almost frozen in the Hubble flow, these strings are quasi static and evade almost all of the previously derived constraints on their tension while being able to source large scale anisotropies in the CMB sky. Using a local variance estimator on thousand of numerically simulated Nambu-Goto all sky maps, we compute the expected signal and show that it can mimic a dipole modulation at large angular scales while being negligible at small angles. Interestingly, such a scenario generically produces one cold spot from the thawing of a cosmic string loop. Mixed with anisotropies of inflationary origin, we find that a few strings of tension GU = O(1) x 10^(-6) match the amplitude of the dipole modulation reported in the Planck satellite measurements and could be at the origin of other large scale anomalies.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2015

The exact numerical treatment of inflationary models

The precision reached by the recent CMB measurements gives new insights into the shape of the primordial power spectra of the cosmological perturbations. In the context of inflationary cosmology, this implies that the CMB data are now sensitive to the form of the inflaton potential. Most of the current approaches devoted to the derivation of the inflationary primordial power spectra, or to the inflaton potential reconstruction problem, rely on approximate analytical treatments that may break down for exotic models. In this article, we numerically solve the inflationary evolution of both the background and all the perturbed quantities to extract the primordial power spectra exactly. Such a method solely relies on General Relativity and linear perturbation theory. More than providing a tool to test analytical approximations, one may consider, without complications, the treatment of non-standard inflationary models as those involving several fields, eventually non-minimally coupled to gravity. The usefulness of the exact numerical approach to deal with CMB data is illustrated by analysing the WMAP third year data in the context of single field models. For this purpose, we introduce a new inflationary related parameter encoding the basic properties of the reheating era. This reheating parameter has significant observable effects and provides a self-consistency test of inflationary models. As a working example, the marginalised probability distributions of the reheating and potential parameters associated with the small field models are presented.

astro-ph↗

arXiv2015

Observing the Inflationary Reheating

Reheating is the the epoch which connects inflation to the subsequent hot Big-Bang phase. Conceptually very important, this era is however observationally poorly known. We show that the current Planck satellite measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies constrain the kinematic properties of the reheating era for most of the inflationary models. This result is obtained by deriving the marginalized posterior distributions of the reheating parameter for about 200 models taken in Encyclopaedia Inflationaris. Weighted by the statistical evidence of each model to explain the data, we show that the Planck 2013 measurements induce an average reduction of the posterior-to-prior volume by 40%. Making some additional assumptions on reheating, such as specifying a mean equation of state parameter, or focusing the analysis on peculiar scenarios, can enhance or reduce this constraint. Our study also indicates that the Bayesian evidence of a model can substantially be affected by the reheating properties. The precision of the current CMB data is therefore such that estimating the observational performance of a model now requires to incorporate information about its reheating history.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2015

Cascading dust inflation in Born-Infeld gravity

In the framework of Born-Infeld inspired gravity theories, which deviates from General Relativity (GR) in the high curvature regime, we discuss the viability of Cosmic Inflation without scalar fields. For energy densities higher than the new mass scale of the theory, a gravitating dust component is shown to generically induce an accelerated expansion of the Universe. Within such a simple scenario, inflation gracefully exits when the GR regime is recovered, but the Universe would remain matter dominated. In order to implement a reheating era after inflation, we then consider inflation to be driven by a mixture of unstable dust species decaying into radiation. Because the speed of sound gravitates within the Born-Infeld model under consideration, our scenario ends up being predictive on various open questions of the inflationary paradigm. The total number of e-folds of acceleration is given by the lifetime of the unstable dust components and is related to the duration of reheating. As a result, inflation does not last much longer than the number of e-folds of deceleration allowing a small spatial curvature and large scale deviations to isotropy to be observable today. Energy densities are self-regulated as inflation can only start for a total energy density less than a threshold value, again related to the species' lifetime. Above this threshold, the Universe may bounce thereby avoiding a singularity. Another distinctive feature is that the accelerated expansion is of the superinflationary kind, namely the first Hubble flow function is negative. We show however that the tensor modes are never excited and the tensor-to-scalar ratio is always vanishing, independently of the energy scale of inflation.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2014

How Well Can Future CMB Missions Constrain Cosmic Inflation?

We study how the next generation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurement missions (such as EPIC, LiteBIRD, PRISM and COrE) will be able to constrain the inflationary landscape in the hardest to disambiguate situation in which inflation is simply described by single-field slow-roll scenarios. Considering the proposed PRISM and LiteBIRD satellite designs, we simulate mock data corresponding to five different fiducial models having values of the tensor-to-scalar ratio ranging from $10^{-1}$ down to $10^{-7}$. We then compute the Bayesian evidences and complexities of all Encyclopaedia Inflationaris models in order to assess the constraining power of PRISM alone and LiteBIRD complemented with the Planck 2013 data. Within slow-roll inflation, both designs have comparable constraining power and can rule out about three quarters of the inflationary scenarios, compared to one third for Planck 2013 data alone. However, we also show that PRISM can constrain the scalar running and has the capability to detect a violation of slow roll at second order. Finally, our results suggest that describing an inflationary model by its potential shape only, without specifying a reheating temperature, will no longer be possible given the accuracy level reached by the future CMB missions.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Compatibility of Planck and BICEP2 in the Light of Inflation

We investigate the implications for inflation of the detection of B-modes polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by BICEP2. We show that the hypothesis of primordial origin of the measurement is only favored by the first four bandpowers, while the others would prefer unreasonably large values of the tensor-to-scalar ratio. Using only those four bandpowers, we carry out a complete analysis in the cosmological and inflationary slow-roll parameter space using the BICEP2 polarization measurements alone and extract the Bayesian evidences and complexities for all the Encyclopaedia Inflationaris models. This allows us to determine the most probable and simplest BICEP2 inflationary scenarios. Although this list contains the simplest monomial potentials, it also includes many other scenarios, suggesting that focusing model building efforts on large field models only is unjustified at this stage. We demonstrate that the sets of inflationary models preferred by Planck alone and BICEP2 alone are almost disjoint, indicating a clear tension between the two data sets. We address this tension with a Bayesian measure of compatibility between BICEP2 and Planck. We find that for models favored by Planck the two data sets tend to be incompatible, whereas there is a moderate evidence of compatibility for the BICEP2 preferred models. As a result, it would be premature to draw any conclusion on the best Planck models, such as Starobinsky and/or Kahler moduli inflation. For the subset of scenarios not exhibiting data sets incompatibility, we update the evidences and complexities using both data sets together.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

The Best Inflationary Models After Planck

We compute the Bayesian evidence and complexity of 193 slow-roll single-field models of inflation using the Planck 2013 Cosmic Microwave Background data, with the aim of establishing which models are favoured from a Bayesian perspective. Our calculations employ a new numerical pipeline interfacing an inflationary effective likelihood with the slow-roll library ASPIC and the nested sampling algorithm MULTINEST. The models considered represent a complete and systematic scan of the entire landscape of inflationary scenarios proposed so far. Our analysis singles out the most probable models (from an Occam's razor point of view) that are compatible with Planck data, while ruling out with very strong evidence 34% of the models considered. We identify 26% of the models that are favoured by the Bayesian evidence, corresponding to 15 different potential shapes. If the Bayesian complexity is included in the analysis, only 9% of the models are preferred, corresponding to only 9 different potential shapes. These shapes are all of the plateau type.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2014

Fast Bayesian inference for slow-roll inflation

We present and discuss a new approach increasing by orders of magnitude the speed of performing Bayesian inference and parameter estimation within the framework of slow-roll inflation. The method relies on the determination of an effective likelihood for inflation which is a function of the primordial amplitude of the scalar perturbations complemented with the necessary number of the so-called Hubble flow functions to reach the desired accuracy. Starting from any cosmological data set, the effective likelihood is obtained by marginalisation over the standard cosmological parameters, here viewed as "nuisance" from the early Universe point of view. As being low-dimensional, basic machine-learning algorithms can be trained to accurately reproduce its multidimensional shape and then be used as a proxy to perform fast Bayesian inference on the inflationary models. The robustness and accuracy of the method are illustrated using the Planck Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data to perform primordial parameter estimation for the large field models of inflation. In particular, marginalised over all possible reheating history, we find the power index of the potential to verify p < 2.3 at 95% of confidence.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

K-inflationary Power Spectra at Second Order

Within the class of inflationary models, k-inflation represents the most general single field framework that can be associated with an effective quadratic action for the curvature perturbations and a varying speed of sound. The incoming flow of high-precision cosmological data, such as those from the Planck satellite and small scale Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, calls for greater accuracy in the inflationary predictions. In this work, we calculate for the first time the next-to-next-to-leading order scalar and tensor primordial power spectra in k-inflation needed in order to obtain robust constraints on the inflationary theory. The method used is the uniform approximation together with a second order expansion in the Hubble and sound flow functions. Our result is checked in various limits in which it reduces to already known situations.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

Exact Mapping between Tensor and Most General Scalar Power Spectra

We prove an exact relation between the tensor and the scalar primordial power spectra generated during inflation. Such a mapping considerably simplifies the derivation of any power spectra as they can be obtained from the study of the tensor modes only, which are much easier to solve. As an illustration, starting from the second order slow-roll tensor power spectrum, we derive in a few lines the next-to-next-to-leading order power spectrum of the comoving curvature perturbation in generalized single field inflation with a varying speed of sound.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

A Boltzmann treatment for the vorton excess problem

We derive and solve a Boltzmann equation governing the cosmological evolution of the number density of current carrying cosmic string loops, whose centrifugally supported equilibrium configurations are also referred to as vortons. The phase space is three-dimensional and consists of the time variable, the loop size, and a conserved quantum number. Our approach includes gravitational wave emission, a possibly finite lifetime for the vortons and works with any initial loop distribution and for any loop production function. We then show how our results generalize previous approaches on the vorton excess problem by tracking down the time evolution of the various sub-populations of current-carrying loops in a string network.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

Early Universe Tomography with CMB and Gravitational Waves

We discuss how one can reconstruct the thermal history of the Universe by combining cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and gravitational wave (GW) direct detection experiments. Assuming various expansion eras to take place after the inflationary reheating and before Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), we show how measurements of the GW spectrum can be used to break the degeneracies associated with CMB data, the latter being sensitive to the total amount of cosmic expansion only. In this context, we argue that the expected constraints from future CMB and GW experiments can probe a scenario in which there exists late-time entropy production in addition to the standard reheating. We show that, for some cases, combining data from future CMB and GW direct detection experiments allows the determination of the reheating temperature, the amount of entropy produced and the temperature at which the standard radiation era started.

astro-ph.CO↗