arXiv subjects

Ruth Durrer

Publications and source records attributed to Ruth Durrer.

205 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

arXiv1996

The Oscillating Universe: an Alternative to Inflation

The aim of this paper is to show, that the 'oscillating universe' is a viable alternative to inflation. We remind that this model provides a natural solution to the flatness or entropy and to the horizon problem of standard cosmology. We study the evolution of density perturbations and determine the power spectrum in a closed universe. The results lead to constraints of how a previous cycle might have looked like. We argue that most of the radiation entropy of the present universe may have originated from gravitational entropy produced in a previous cycle. We show that measurements of the power spectrum on very large scales could in principle decide whether our universe is closed, flat or open.

gr-qc↗

arXiv1995

Doppler Peaks in the Angular Power Spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background: A Fingerprint of Topological Defects

The Doppler peaks (Sacharov peaks) in the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, are mainly due to coherent oscillations in the baryon radiation plasma before recombination. Here we present a calculation of the Doppler peaks for perturbations induced by global textures and cold dark matter. We find that the height of the first Doppler peak is smaller than in standard cold dark matter models, and that its position is shifted to $\ell\sim 350$. We believe that our analysis can be easily extended to other types of global topological defects and general global scalar fields.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1994

Global field dynamics and cosmological tructure formation

We discuss gravitational effects of global scalar fields and, especially, of global topological defects. We first give an introduction to the dynamics of global fields and the formation of defects. Next we investigate the induced gravitational fields, first in a flat background and then in the expanding universe. In flat space, we explicitly calculate the gravitational fields of exact global monopole and global texture solutions and discuss the motion of photons and massive particles in these geometries. We also show that slowly moving particles and the energy of photons are not affected in static scalar field configurations with vanishing potential energy. In expanding space, we explore the possibility that global topological defects from a phase transition in the very early universe may have seeded inhomogeneities in the energy distribution which yielded the observed large scale structure in the Universe, the sheets of galaxies, clusters, voids ... . We outline numerical simulations which have been performed to tackle this problem and briefly discuss their results.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1994

Structure Formation in the Universe from Texture Induced Fluctuation

The topic of this letter is structure formation with topological defects. We first present a partially new, fully local and gauge invariant system of perturbation equations to treat microwave background and dark matter fluctuations induced by topological defects (or any other type of seeds). We show that this treatment is extremly well suited for linear numerical analysis of structure formation by applying it to the texture scenario. Our numerical results cover a larger dynamical range than previous investigations and are complementary since we use substantially different methods.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1994

Light Deflection in Perturbed Friedmann Universes

In this letter a new formula for light deflection is derived using only physically observable concepts. The general result is specialized to cosmological perturbation theory and expressed in terms of gauge--invariant perturbation variables. The resulting scalar, vector and tensor equations are supplemented by simple examples for illustration. The gravity wave example may be of more than academic interest and even represent a new way to detect gravitational waves.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1993

Gauge Invariant Cosmological Perturbation Theory

After an introduction to the problem of cosmological structure formation, we develop gauge invariant cosmological perturbation theory. We derive the first order perturbation equations of Einstein's equations and energy momentum ``conservation''. Furthermore, the perturbations of Liouville's equation for collisionless particles and Boltzmann's equation for Compton scattering are worked out. We fully discuss the propagation of photons in a perturbed Friedmann universe, calculating the Sachs--Wolfe effect and light deflection. The perturbation equations are extended to accommodate also perturbations induced by seeds. With these general results we discuss some of the main aspects of the texture model for the formation of large scale structure in the Universe (galaxies, clusters, sheets, voids). In this model, perturbations in the dark matter are induced by texture seeds. The gravitational effects of a spherically symmetric collapsing texture on dark matter, baryonic matter and photons are calculated in first order perturbation theory. We study the characteristic signature of the microwave background fluctuations induced in this scenario and compare it with the COBE observations.

astro-ph↗

arXiv1993

Early Reionization in Cosmology

The cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies have turned out to represent one of the most stringent 'bottle necks' for scenarios of large scale structure formation. As a possibility to relax this constraint, it has been proposed that early reionization can damp CMB fluctuations on small scales due to photon diffusion in the ionized plasma. As an example, I investigate the recently proposed scenario with cold dark matter (CDM) and texture seeds. There, an analysis of CMB anisotropies shows that early reionization is a crucial ingredient for this scenario. Without damping, the small scale anisotropies would dominate and exceed observed limits. In this paper I present analytical and numerical results for the amount of damping due to early reionization for CMB perturbations induced by a collapsing texture. Furthermore, the spectral distortion of the CMB due to Compton scattering of the hotter plasma electrons is calculated. Next I discuss the physical processes which lead to a system of coupled ordinary differential equations for the degree of ionization, the electron temperature and the evolution of the ionizing radiation.

astro-ph↗