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Full-Text Articles in Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity

Stability Bounds On Compact Astrophysical Objects From Information-Entropic Measure, Marcelo Gleiser, Nan Jiang Aug 2015

Stability Bounds On Compact Astrophysical Objects From Information-Entropic Measure, Marcelo Gleiser, Nan Jiang

Dartmouth Scholarship

We obtain bounds on the stability of various self-gravitating astrophysical objects using a new measure of shape complexity known as configurational entropy. We apply the method to Newtonian polytropes, neutron stars with an Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation of state, and to self-gravitating configurations of complex scalar field (boson stars) with different self couplings, showing that the critical stability region of these stellar configurations obtained from traditional perturbation methods correlates well with critical points of the configurational entropy with accuracy of a few percent or better.


Chiral Imprint Of A Cosmic Gauge Field On Primordial Gravitational Waves, Jannis Bielefeld, Robert R. Caldwell Jun 2015

Chiral Imprint Of A Cosmic Gauge Field On Primordial Gravitational Waves, Jannis Bielefeld, Robert R. Caldwell

Dartmouth Scholarship

A cosmological gauge field with isotropic stress-energy introduces parity violation into the behavior of gravitational waves. We show that a primordial spectrum of inflationary gravitational waves develops a preferred handedness, left or right circularly polarized, depending on the abundance and coupling of the gauge field during the radiation era. A modest abundance of the gauge field would induce parity-violating correlations of the cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization patterns that could be detected by current and future experiments.


Fermi-Bounce Cosmology And The Fermion Curvaton Mechanism, Stephon Alexander, Yi-Fu Cai, Antonino Marcianò May 2015

Fermi-Bounce Cosmology And The Fermion Curvaton Mechanism, Stephon Alexander, Yi-Fu Cai, Antonino Marcianò

Dartmouth Scholarship

A nonsingular bouncing cosmology can be achieved by introducing a fermion field with BCS condensation occurring at high energy scales. In this paper we are able to dilute the anisotropic stress near the bounce by means of releasing the gap energy density near the phase transition between the radiation and condensate states. In order to explain the nearly scale-invariant CMB spectrum, another fermion field is required. We investigate one possible curvaton mechanism by involving one another fermion field without condensation where the mass is lighter than the background field. We show that, by virtue of the fermion curvaton mechanism, our …


Gravitational-Wave Mediated Preheating, Stephon Alexander, Sam Cormack, Antonino Marcianò, Nicolás Yunes Apr 2015

Gravitational-Wave Mediated Preheating, Stephon Alexander, Sam Cormack, Antonino Marcianò, Nicolás Yunes

Dartmouth Scholarship

We propose a new preheating mechanism through the coupling of the gravitational field to both the inflaton and matter fields, without direct inflaton–matter couplings. The inflaton transfers power to the matter fields through interactions with gravitational waves, which are exponentially enhanced due to an inflation–graviton coupling. One such coupling is the product of the inflaton to the Pontryagin density, as in dynamical Chern–Simons gravity. The energy scales involved are constrained by requiring that preheating happens fast during matter domination.