arXiv subjects

Dominik J. Schwarz

Publications and source records attributed to Dominik J. Schwarz.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2013

Reionization and the Cosmic Dawn with the Square Kilometre Array

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will have a low frequency component (SKA-low) which has as one of its main science goals the study of the redshifted 21cm line from the earliest phases of star and galaxy formation in the Universe. This 21cm signal provides a new and unique window on both the formation of the first stars and accreting black holes and the later period of substantial ionization of the intergalactic medium. The signal will teach us fundamental new things about the earliest phases of structure formation, cosmology and even has the potential to lead to the discovery of new physical phenomena. Here we present a white paper with an overview of the science questions that SKA-low can address, how we plan to tackle these questions and what this implies for the basic design of the telescope.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2013

Does the CMB prefer a leptonic Universe?

Recent observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) at smallest angular scales and updated abundances of primordial elements, indicate an increase of the energy density and the helium-4 abundance with respect to standard big bang nucleosynthesis with three neutrino flavour. This calls for a reanalysis of the observational bounds on neutrino chemical potentials, which encode the number asymmetry between cosmic neutrinos and anti-neutrinos and thus measures the lepton asymmetry of the Universe. We compare recent data with a big bang nucleosynthesis code, assuming neutrino flavour equilibration via neutrino oscillations before the onset of big bang nucleosynthesis. We find a slight preference for negative neutrino chemical potentials, which would imply an excess of anti-neutrinos and thus a negative lepton number of the Universe. This lepton asymmetry could exceed the baryon asymmetry by orders of magnitude.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2012

Relative information entropy and Weyl curvature of the inhomogeneous Universe

Penrose conjectured a connection between entropy and Weyl curvature of the Universe. This is plausible, as the almost homogeneous and isotropic Universe at the onset of structure formation has negligible Weyl curvature, which then grows (relative to the Ricci curvature) due to the formation of large-scale structure and thus reminds us of the second law of thermodynamics. We study two scalar measures to quantify the deviations from a homogeneous and isotropic space-time, the relative information entropy and a Weyl tensor invariant, and show their relation to the averaging problem. We calculate these two quantities up to second order in standard cosmological perturbation theory and find that they are correlated and can be linked via the kinematic backreaction of a spatially averaged universe model.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2012

Dissipation of dark matter

Fluids often display dissipative properties. We explore dissipation in the form of bulk viscosity in the cold dark matter fluid. We constrain this model using current data from supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations and the cosmic microwave background. Considering the isotropic and homogeneous background only, viscous dark matter is allowed to have a bulk viscosity $\lesssim 10^7$ Pa$\cdot$s, also consistent with the expected integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (which plagues some models with bulk viscosity). We further investigate the small-scale formation of viscous dark matter halos, which turns out to place significantly stronger constraints on the dark matter viscosity. The existence of dwarf galaxies is guaranteed only for much smaller values of the dark matter viscosity, $\lesssim 10^{-3}$ Pa$\cdot$s.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2012

Newtonian versus relativistic cosmology

We show how the relativistic matter and velocity power spectra behave in different gauges. We construct a new gauge where both spectra coincide with Newtonian theory on all scales. However, in this gauge there are geometric quantities present which do not exist in Newtonian theory, for example the local variation of the Hubble parameter. Comparing this quantity to second order Newtonian quantities, we find that Newtonian theory is inaccurate on scales larger than 10 Mpc. This stresses the importance of relativistic corrections to Newtonian cosmological N-body simulations on these scales.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2012

Predictions of just-enough inflation

We find the best-fit cosmological parameters for a scenario of inflation with only the sufficient amount of accelerated expansion for the $λϕ^4$ potential. While for the simplest scenario of chaotic inflation all observable primordial fluctuations cross the Hubble horizon during the slow-roll epoch, for the scenario of just-enough inflation the slow-roll conditions are violated at the largest length scales. Performing a numerical mode-by-mode integration for the perturbations on the largest scales and comparing the predicted anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background to results from the WMAP 7-yr data analysis, we find the initial conditions in agreement with current cosmological data. In contrast to the simplest chaotic model for the quartic potential, the just-enough inflation scenario is not ruled out. Although this scenario naturally gives rise to a modification of the first multipoles, for a quartic potential it cannot explain the lack of power at the largest angular scales.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2012

First second of leptons

A poorly constrained parameter in the Standard Model of Cosmology is the lepton asymmetry l = \sum_f l_f=\sum_f(n_f+n_{ν_f})/s. Each flavour asymmetry l_f with f=e, μ, τ is the sum of the net particle density of the charged leptons n_f and their corresponding neutrinos, normalized with the entropy density s. Constraints on l_f \leq O(0.1) from BBN and CMB allow for lepton flavour asymmetries orders of magnitudes larger then the baryon asymmetry b ~ 10^{-10}. In this article we show how such large lepton (flavour) asymmetries influence the early universe, in particular the freeze out of WIMPs and the cosmic QCD transition.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2012

Inhomogeneity-induced variance of cosmological parameters

Modern cosmology relies on the assumption of large-scale isotropy and homogeneity of the Universe. However, locally the Universe is inhomogeneous and anisotropic. So, how can local measurements (at the 100 Mpc scale) be used to determine global cosmological parameters (defined at the 10 Gpc scale)? We use Buchert's averaging formalism and determine a set of locally averaged cosmological parameters in the context of the flat Lambda cold dark matter model. We calculate their ensemble means (i.e. their global values) and variances (i.e. their cosmic variances). We apply our results to typical survey geometries and focus on the study of the effects of local fluctuations of the curvature parameter. By this means we show, that in the linear regime cosmological backreaction and averaging can be reformulated as the issue of cosmic variance. The cosmic variance is found largest for the curvature parameter and discuss some of its consequences. We further propose to use the observed variance of cosmological parameters to measure the growth factor. [abbreviated]

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2011

Constraints on dissipative unified dark matter

Modern cosmology suggests that the Universe contains two dark components -- dark matter and dark energy -- both unkown in laboratory physics and both lacking direct evidence. Alternatively, a unified dark sector, described by a single fluid, has been proposed. Dissipation is a common phenomenon in nature and it thus seems natural to consider models dominated by a viscous dark fluid. We focus on the study of bulk viscosity, as isotropy and homogeneity at large scales implies the suppression of shear viscosity, heat flow and diffusion. The generic ansatz $ξ\propto ρ^ν$ for the coefficient of bulk viscosity ($ρ$ denotes the mass/energy density), which for $ν= - 1/2$ mimics the $Λ$CDM background evolution, offers excellent fits to supernova and H(z) data. We show that viscous dark fluids suffer from large contributions to the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect (generalising a previous study by Li & Barrow) and a suppression of structure growth at small-scales (as seen from a generalized Meszaros equation). Based on recent observations, we conclude that viscous dark fluid models (with $ξ\propto ρ^ν$ and neglecting baryons) are strongly challenged.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2011

Reconstruction of the primordial power spectrum from CMB data

Measuring the deviation from scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum is a critical test of inflation. In this paper we reconstruct the shape of the primordial power spectrum of curvature perturbations from the cosmic microwave background data, including the 7-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope 148 GHz data, by using a binning method of a cubic spline interpolation in log-log space. We find that the power-law spectrum is preferred by the data and that the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum is disfavored at 95% confidence level. These conclusions hold with and without allowing for tensor modes, however the simpler model without tensors is preferred by the data. We do not find evidence for a feature in the primordial power spectrum - in full agreement with generic predictions from cosmological inflation.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2011

Cosmological Measurements with Forthcoming Radio Continuum Surveys

We present forecasts for constraints on cosmological models which can be obtained by forthcoming radio continuum surveys: the wide surveys with the LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Westerbork Observations of the Deep APERTIF Northern sky (WODAN). We use simulated catalogues appropriate to the planned surveys to predict measurements obtained with the source auto-correlation, the cross-correlation between radio sources and CMB maps (the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect), the cross-correlation of radio sources with foreground objects due to cosmic magnification, and a joint analysis together with the CMB power spectrum and supernovae. We show that near future radio surveys will bring complementary measurements to other experiments, probing different cosmological volumes, and having different systematics. Our results show that the unprecedented sky coverage of these surveys combined should provide the most significant measurement yet of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. In addition, we show that using the ISW effect will significantly tighten constraints on modified gravity parameters, while the best measurements of dark energy models will come from galaxy auto-correlation function analyses. Using the combination of EMU and WODAN to provide a full sky survey, it will be possible to measure the dark energy parameters with an uncertainty of \{$σ(w_0) = 0.05$, $σ(w_a) = 0.12$\} and the modified gravity parameters \{$σ(η_0) = 0.10$, $σ(μ_0) = 0.05$\}, assuming Planck CMB+SN(current data) priors. Finally, we show that radio surveys would detect a primordial non-Gaussianity of $f_{\rm NL}$ = 8 at 1-$σ$ and we briefly discuss other promising probes.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2011

Bias in low-multipole CMB reconstructions

The large-angle, low multipole cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a unique view of the largest angular scales in the Universe. Study of these scales is hampered by the facts that we have only one Universe to observe, only a few independent samples of the underlying statistical distribution of these modes, and an incomplete sky to observe due to the interposing Galaxy. Techniques for reconstructing a full sky from partial sky data are well known and have been applied to the large angular scales. In this work we critically study the reconstruction process and show that, in practise, the reconstruction is biased due to leakage of information from the region obscured by foregrounds to the region used for the reconstruction. We conclude that, despite being suboptimal in a technical sense, using the unobscured region without reconstructing is the most robust measure of the true CMB sky. We also show that for noise free data reconstructing using the usual optimal, unbiased estimator may be employed without smoothing thus avoiding the leakage problem. Unfortunately, directly applying this to real data with noise and residual, unmasked foregrounds yields highly biased reconstructions requiring further care to apply this method successfully to real-world CMB.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2011

Observational constraints on the energy scale of inflation

Determining the energy scale of inflation is crucial to understand the nature of inflation in the early Universe. We place observational constraints on the energy scale of the observable part of the inflaton potential by combining the 7-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data with distance measurements from the baryon acoustic oscillations in the distribution of galaxies and the Hubble constant measurement. Our analysis provides an upper limit on this energy scale, 2.3 \times 10^{16} GeV at 95% confidence level. Moreover, we forecast the sensitivity and constraints achievable by the Planck experiment by performing Monte Carlo studies on simulated data. Planck could significantly improve the constraints on the energy scale of inflation and on the shape of the inflaton potential.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2011

Large-Scale Suppression from Stochastic Inflation

We show non-perturbatively that the power spectrum of a self-interacting scalar field in de Sitter space-time is strongly suppressed on large scales. The cut-off scale depends on the strength of the self-coupling, the number of e-folds of quasi-de Sitter evolution, and its expansion rate. As a consequence, the two-point correlation function of field fluctuations is free from infra-red divergencies.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2010

On the accelerated expansion of the cosmos

We present a short (and necessarily incomplete) review of the evidence for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The most direct probe of acceleration relies on the detailed study of supernovae (SN) of type Ia. Assuming that these are standardizable candles and that they fairly sample a homogeneous and isotropic Universe, the evidence for acceleration can be tested in a model- and calibration-independent way. Various light-curve fitting procedures have been proposed and tested. While several fitters give consistent results for the so-called Constitution set, they lead to inconsistent results for the recently released SDSS SN. Adopting the SALT fitter and relying on the Union set, cosmic acceleration is detected by a purely kinematic test at 7 sigma when spatial flatness is assumed and at 4 sigma without assumption on the spatial geometry. A weak point of the described method is the local set of SN (at z < 0.2), as these SN are essential to anchor the Hubble diagram. These SN are drawn from a volume much smaller than the Hubble volume and could be affected by local structure. Without the assumption of homogeneity, there is no evidence for acceleration, as the effects of acceleration are degenerate with the effects of inhomogeneities. Unless we sit in the centre of the Universe, such inhomogeneities can be constrained by SN observations by means of tests of the isotropy of the Hubble flow.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2010

Large-angle anomalies in the CMB

We review the recently found large-scale anomalies in the maps of temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. These include alignments of the largest modes of CMB anisotropy with each other and with geometry and direction of motion of the Solar System, and the unusually low power at these largest scales. We discuss these findings in relation to expectation from standard inflationary cosmology, their statistical significance, the tools to study them, and the various attempts to explain them.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2010

Distinguishing standard reionization from dark matter models

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) experiment has detected reionization at the $5.5 σ$ level and has reported a mean optical depth of $0.088 \pm 0.015$. A powerful probe of reionization is the large-angle $EE$ polarization power spectrum, which is now (since the first five years of data from WMAP) cosmic variance limited for $2\le l \le6$. Here we consider partial reionization caused by WIMP dark matter annihilation, and calculate the expected polarization power spectrum. We compare the dark matter models with a standard 2-step reionization theory, and examine whether the models may be distinguished using current, and future CMB observations. We consider dark matter annihilation at intermediate redshifts ($z<60$) due to halos, as well as annihilation at higher redshifts due to free particles. In order to study the effect of high redshift dark matter annihilation on CMB power spectra, it is essential to include the contribution of residual electrons (left over from recombination) to the ionization history. Dark matter halos at redshifts $z<60$ influence the low multipoles $l<20$ in the $EE$ power spectrum, while the annihilation of free particle dark matter at high redshifts $z>100$ mainly affects multipoles $l>10$.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2010

Slow-roll inflation with a Gauss-Bonnet correction

We consider slow-roll inflation for a single scalar field with an arbitrary potential and an arbitrary nonminimal coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet term. By introducing a combined hierarchy of Hubble and Gauss-Bonnet flow functions, we analytically derive the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations. The standard consistency relation between the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the spectral index of tensor perturbations is broken. We apply this formalism to a specific model with a monomial potential and an inverse monomial Gauss-Bonnet coupling and constrain it by the 7-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data. The Gauss-Bonnet term with a positive (or negative) coupling may lead to a reduction (or enhancement) of the tensor-to-scalar ratio and hence may revive the quartic potential ruled out by recent cosmological data.

hep-th↗