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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Astrophysics and Astronomy

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Dartmouth College

2010

Physics of elementary particles and fields

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Long-Lived Time-Dependent Remnants During Cosmological Symmetry Breaking: From Inflation To The Electroweak Scale, Marcelo Gleiser, Noah Graham, Nikitas Stamatopoulos Aug 2010

Long-Lived Time-Dependent Remnants During Cosmological Symmetry Breaking: From Inflation To The Electroweak Scale, Marcelo Gleiser, Noah Graham, Nikitas Stamatopoulos

Dartmouth Scholarship

Through a detailed numerical investigation in three spatial dimensions, we demonstrate that long-lived time-dependent field configurations emerge dynamically during symmetry breaking in an expanding de Sitter spacetime. We investigate two situations: a single scalar field with a double-well potential and an SU(2) non-Abelian Higgs model. For the single scalar, we show that large-amplitude oscillon configurations emerge spontaneously and persist to contribute about 1.2% of the energy density of the Universe. We also show that for a range of parameters, oscillon lifetimes are enhanced by the expansion and that this effect is a result of parametric resonance. For the SU(2) case, …


Testing General Relativity With Current Cosmological Data, Scott F. Daniel, Eric V. Linder, Tristan L. Smith, Robert R. Caldwell Jun 2010

Testing General Relativity With Current Cosmological Data, Scott F. Daniel, Eric V. Linder, Tristan L. Smith, Robert R. Caldwell

Dartmouth Scholarship

Deviations from general relativity, such as could be responsible for the cosmic acceleration, would influence the growth of large-scale structure and the deflection of light by that structure. We clarify the relations between several different model-independent approaches to deviations from general relativity appearing in the literature, devising a translation table. We examine current constraints on such deviations, using weak gravitational lensing data of the CFHTLS and COSMOS surveys, cosmic microwave background radiation data of WMAP5, and supernova distance data of Union2. A Markov chain Monte Carlo likelihood analysis of the parameters over various redshift ranges yields consistency with general relativity …