arXiv subjects

De-Chang Dai

Publications and source records attributed to De-Chang Dai.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Connecting the Higgs Potential and Primordial Black Holes

It was recently demonstrated that small small black holes can act as seeds for nucleating decay of the metastable Higgs vacuum, dramatically increasing the tunneling probability. Any primordial black hole lighter than $4.5 \times 10^{14}$g at formation would have evaporated by now, and in the absence of new physics beyond the standard model, would therefore have entered the mass range in which seeded decay occurs, however, such true vacuum bubbles must percolate in order to completely destroy the false vacuum; this depends on the bubble number density and the rate of expansion of the universe. Here, we compute the fraction of the universe that has decayed to the true vacuum as a function of the formation temperature (or equivalently, mass) of the primordial black holes, and the spectral index of the fluctuations responsible for their formation. This allows us to constrain the mass spectrum of primordial black holes given a particular Higgs potential and conversely, should we discover primordial black holes of definite mass, we can constrain the Higgs potential parameters.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2020

Observing a wormhole

If a traversable wormhole smoothly connects two different spacetimes, then the flux cannot be separately conserved in any of these spaces individually. Then objects propagating in a vicinity of a wormhole in one space must feel influence of objects propagating in the other space. We show this in the cases of the scalar, electromagnetic, and gravitational field. The case of gravity is perhaps the most interesting. Namely, by studying the orbits of stars around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, we could soon tell if this black hole harbors a traversable wormhole. In particular, with a near future acceleration precision of $10^{-6} m/s^2$, a few solar masses star orbiting around Sgr A* on the other side of the wormhole at the distance of a few gravitational radii would leave detectable imprint on the orbit of the S2 star on our side. Alternatively, one can expect the same effect in black hole binary systems, or a black hole - star binary systems. Another result that we find very interesting is that gravitational perturbations can be felt even on the other side of the non-traversable wormhole.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2020

Response to the Comment on "Observing a wormhole"

In the Comment written by Krasnikov \cite{Krasnikov:2019mrd} on our recent paper \cite{Dai:2019mse}, the author argues that a spherically symmetric perturbation coming from a massive object located on the other side of the wormhole would just add up to the total mass of the central object, and is therefore useless as an indicator of the wormhole presence. We point out that our Eq.~(37) represents an {\it acceleration variation} in the motion of the star S2 due to an elliptic (and thus non-spherically symmetric) orbit of the star on the other side perturbing the metric. This time-dependent acceleration variation is in principle distinguishable from the original acceleration coming from the central object. We also point out that the author is trying to apply Birkhoff's theorem in a setup where it cannot be applied in a straightforward way.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

Primordial scalar gravitational waves produced at the QCD phase transition due to the trace anomaly

Relying only on the standard model of elementary particles and gravity, we study the details of a new source of gravitational waves whose origin is in quantum physics. Namely, it is well known that massless fields in curved backgrounds suffer from the so-called "trace anomaly". This anomaly can be cast in terms of new scalar degrees of freedom which take account of macroscopic effects of quantum matter in gravitational fields. The linearized effective action for these fields describes scalar (as opposed to transverse) gravitational waves, which are absent in Einstein's theory. Since these new degrees of freedom couple directly to the gauge field scalars in QCD, the epoch of the QCD phase transition in early universe is a possible source of primordial cosmological gravitational radiation. While the anomaly is most likely fully unsuppressed at the QCD densities (temperature is much higher than the u and d quark masses), just to be careful we introduced the window function which cuts-off very low frequencies where the anomaly effect might be suppressed. We then calculated the characteristic strain of the properly adjusted gravitational waves signal today. The region of the parameter space with no window function gives a stronger signal, and both the strain and the frequencies fall within the sensitivity of the near future gravitational wave experiments (e.g. LISA and The Big Bang Observer). The possibility that one can study quantum physics with gravitational wave astronomy even in principle is exciting, and will be of value for future endeavors in this field.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2019

State of a particle pair produced by the Schwinger effect is not necessarily a maximally entangled Bell state

We analyze the spins of a Schwinger particle pair in a spatially uniform but time dependent electric field. The particle pair's spins are in the maximally entangled Bell state only if the particles' momenta are parallel to the electric field. However if transverse momentum is present, the spins are not in the maximally entangled Bell state. The reason is that the pair is created by the external field, which also carries angular momentum, and the particle pair can take away some of this external angular momentum.

hep-th↗

arXiv2018

Strong lensing constraints on modified gravity models

We impose the first strong-lensing constraints on a wide class of modified gravity models where an extra field that modifies gravity also couples to photons (either directly or indirectly through a coupling with baryons) and thus modifies lensing. We use the nonsingular isothermal ellipsoid (NIE) profile as an effective potential, which produces flat galactic rotation curves. If a concrete modified gravity model gives a flat rotation curve, then the parameter $Γ$ that characterizes the lensing effect must take some definite value. We find that $Γ= 1.24\pm0.65$ at $1σ$, consistent with general relativity ($Γ= 1$). This constrains the parameter space in some recently proposed models.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2018

Measuring the absolute total intrinsic redshifts (surface gravity plus the convective blueshift) of the main sequence stars and red giants using GAIA data

We analyze the GAIA release II data to demonstrate how one can measure the absolute total intrinsic redshifts of the main sequence stars and red giants. We remove the relative velocity components of the stars' motion with respect to the sun by doing the analysis in the local standard of rest (LSR) frame defined by the average stars' motion. We provide results for four different types of stars. F, G and K types of stars have about the same value of intrinsic redshift, which is however much smaller than the expected gravitational redshift. This indicates that the GAIA's data include convective blueshift effect of a several hundreds m/s magnitude. The red giants' intrinsic redshifts are negative, which implies that their convective blueshift is stronger than the gravitational redshift. This is expected since red giants are far less compact than other types.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2018

A new wormhole solution in de Sitter space

We present a new wormhole solution connecting two points of the same universe separated by finite distance. Virtually all the existing solutions connect two disconnected universes, or two points of the same universe that are infinitely far away. We construct our solution by placing two black holes at the antipodes of the closed de Sitter space with a matter shell between them. The gravitational action of the matter shell and cosmological constant counteracts attractive gravity between the black holes and makes the whole configuration static. The whole space outside the wormhole mouths is causally connected, even though the wormhole is not traversable. The stress energy tensor corresponds to de Sitter vacuum everywhere outside of the black holes except at the equator where we match the black hole spacetimes, where a shell with positive energy density appears. We discuss the physical relevance of this solution in various contexts, including the cosmological constant problem.

hep-th↗

arXiv2017

Can $Λ$CDM model reproduce MOND-like behavior?

It is usually believed that MOND can describe the galactic rotational curves with only baryonic matter and without any dark matter very well, while the $Λ$CDM model is expected to have difficulty in reproducing MOND-like behavior. Here, we use EAGLE's data to learn whether the $Λ$CDM model can reproduce MOND-like behavior. EAGLE's simulation result clearly reproduces the MOND-like behavior for $a_b\gtrapprox 10^{-12}\text{m/s}^2$ at $z=0$, although the acceleration constant, $a_0$, is a little larger than the observational data indicate. We find that $a_0$ increases with the redshift in a way different from what Milgrom proposed ($a_0\propto H$). Therefore, while galaxy rotation curves can be fitted by MOND's empirical function in the $Λ$CDM model, there is no clear connection between $a_0$ and the Hubble constant. We also find that $a_0$ at $z\gtrapprox 1$ is well separated from $a_0$ at $z=0$. Once we have enough galaxies observed at high redshifts, we will be able to rule out the modified gravity model based on MOND-like empirical function with a z-independent $a_0$.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

Inconsistencies in Verlinde's emergent gravity

We point out that recent Verlinde's proposal of emergent gravity suffers from some internal inconsistencies. The main idea in this proposal is to preserve general relativity at short scales where numerous tests verified its validity, but modify it on large scales where we meet puzzles raised by observations (in particular dark matter), by using some entropic concepts. We first point out that gravity as a conservative force is very difficult (if possible at all) to portray as an entropic force. We then show that the derivation of the MOND relation using the elastic strain idea is not self-consistent. When properly done, Verlinde's elaborate procedure recovers the standard Newtonian gravity instead of MOND.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

A note on a covariant version of Verlinde's emergent gravity

Following recent Verlinde's heuristic construction or emergent gravity, Hossenfelder wrote down the Lagrangian capturing some aspects of this theory. We point out that there is an error in calculations whose consequence is that a cosmological de Sitter space solution is not recovered from this Lagrangian. We correct this error in order to obtain the desired solution. We also show that small perturbations around de Sitter space grow, which implies that this state is not stable. However, the presence of matter and radiation might in principle provide stability.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

Maximal temperature of the gas in AdS space-time

Assuming only statistical mechanics and general relativity, we calculate the maximal temperature of gas of particles placed in AdS space-time. If two particles with a given center of mass energy come close enough, according to classical gravity they will form a black hole. We focus only on the black holes with Hawking temperature lower than the environment, because they do not disappear. The number density of such black holes grows with the temperature in the system. At a certain finite temperature, the thermodynamical system will be dominated by black holes. This critical temperature is lower than the Planck temperature for the values of the AdS vacuum energy density below the Planck density. This result might be interesting from the AdS/CFT correspondence point of view, since it is different from the Hawking-Page phase transition, and it is not immediately clear what effect dynamically limits the maximal temperature of the thermal state on the CFT side of the correspondence.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2017

Serious limitations of the strong equivalence principle

It is well known that an accelerated charged particle radiates away energy. However, whether an accelerated neutral composite particle radiates away energy is unclear. We study decoherent Larmor radiation from an accelerated neutral composite object. We find that the neutral object's long wavelength radiation is highly suppressed because radiation from different charges is canceled out. However, the neutral object radiates high energy or short wavelength radiation without any suppression. In that case, radiation from each particle can be treated independently, and it is called the decoherent radiation. We compare a hydrogen atom's decoherent Larmor radiation with its gravitational radiation while the atom is in a circular orbit around a star. Gravitational radiation is stronger than the electromagnetic radiation if the orbital radius is larger than some critical radius. Since the decoherent radiation is related to the object's structure, this implies that the strong equivalence principle which states that gravitational motion does not depend on an object's constitution has severe limitations..

physics.gen-ph↗

arXiv2017

A Vector type of Unruh-DeWitt-like detector

We study a type of an Unruh-DeWitt-like detector based on a vector rather than scalar field. This detector has two energy states and produces Larmor radiation when there is no energy gap between them. This setup indicates that Larmor radiation and Unruh radiation are two counterparts of the same phenomenon. Larmor radiation is observed in the inertial frame, while Unruh radiation is observed in an accelerated frame. The accelerated observer sees that his detector absorbed a particle inside its own accelerated horizon, while the Larmor radiation is the companion particle which leaves the accelerated observer's horizon. Since the detection is based on the electromagnetic field, this type of detector is much closer to the real world than a standard Unruh-DeWitt detector which is coupled to a scalar field.

physics.gen-ph↗

arXiv2016

Hydrogen atom wave function and eigen energy in the Rindler space

We study the hydrogen atom eigenstate energy and wave function in the Rindler space. The probability distribution is tilted because the electric field of the nucleus is no longer spherically symmetric. The hydrogen atom therefore cannot be treated exactly in the same way as what it is in an inertial frame. We also find that if the external force accelerates only the nucleus and then the nucleus accelerates its surrounding electrons through electromagnetic force, the electrons can tunnel through the local energy gap and split the hydrogen atom into an ion. This is similar to what one expects from the Stark effect. However, the critical acceleration is about $3\times 10^{22} m/s^2$. It is well beyond the gravitational acceleration on a regular star surface.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2016

Maximal temperature in a simple thermodynamical system

Temperature in a simple thermodynamical system is not limited from above. It is also widely believed that it does not make sense talking about temperatures higher than the Planck temperature in the absence of the full theory of quantum gravity. Here, we demonstrate that there exist a maximal achievable temperature in a system where particles obey the laws of quantum mechanics and classical gravity before we reach the realm of quantum gravity. Namely, if two particles with a given center of mass energy come at the distance shorter than the Schwarzschild diameter apart, according to classical gravity they will form a black hole. It is possible to calculate that a simple thermodynamical system will be dominated by black holes at a critical temperature which is about three times lower than the Planck temperature. That represents the maximal achievable temperature in a simple thermodynamical system.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2016

Collapsing objects with the same gravitational trajectory can radiate away different amount of energy

We study radiation emitted during the gravitational collapse from two different types of shells. We assume that one shell is made of dark matter and is completely transparent to the test scalar (for simplicity) field which belongs to the standard model, while the other shell is made of the standard model particles and is totally reflecting to the scalar field. These two shells have exactly the same mass, charge and angular momentum (though we set the charge and angular momentum to zero), and therefore follow the same geodesic trajectory. However, we demonstrate that they radiate away different amount of energy during the collapse. This difference can in principle be used by an asymptotic observer to reconstruct the physical properties of the initial collapsing object other than mass, charge and angular momentum. This result has implications for the information paradox and expands the list of the type of information which can be released from a collapsing object.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2016

Pre-Hawking radiation may allow for reconstruction of the mass distribution of the collapsing object

Hawking radiation explicitly depends only on the black hole's total mass, charge and angular momentum. It is therefore generally believed that one cannot reconstruct the information about the initial mass distribution of an object that made the black hole. However, instead of looking at radiation from a static black hole, we can study the whole time-dependent process of the gravitational collapse, and pre-Hawking radiation which is excited because of the time-dependent metric. We compare radiation emitted by a single collapsing shell with that emitted by two concentric shells of the equivalent total mass. We calculate the gravitational trajectory and the momentum energy tensor. We show that the flux of energy emitted during the collapse by a single shell is significantly different from the flux emitted by two concentric shells of the equivalent total mass. When the static black hole is formed, the fluxes become indistinguishable. This implies that an observer studying the flux of particles from a collapsing object could in principle reconstruct information not only about the total mass of the collapsing object, but also about the mass distribution.

gr-qc↗