Astrophysics

We perform numerical simulations of gravitational waves (GWs) induced by hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic turbulent sources that might have been present at cosmological quantum chromodynamic (QCD) phase transitions. For turbulent energies of about 4% of the radiation energy density, the typical scale of such motions may have been a sizable fraction of the Hubble scale at that time. The resulting GWs are found to have an energy fraction of about 10 ?? of the critical energy density in the nHz range today and may already have been observed by the NANOGrav collaboration. This is further made possible by our findings of shallower spectra proportional to the square root of the frequency for nonhelical hydromagnetic turbulence. This implies more power at low frequencies than for the steeper spectra previously anticipated. The behavior toward higher frequencies depends strongly on the nature of the turbulence. For vortical hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic turbulence, there is a sharp drop of spectral GW energy by up to five orders of magnitude in the presence of helicity, and somewhat less in the absence of helicity. For acoustic hydrodynamic turbulence, the sharp drop is replaced by a power law decay, albeit with a rather steep slope. Our study supports earlier findings of a quadratic scaling of the GW energy with the magnetic energy of the turbulence and inverse quadratic scaling with the peak frequency, which leads to larger GW energies under QCD conditions.

We propose a new model of Early Dark Energy (EDE) as a solution to the Hubble tension in cosmology, the apparent discrepancy between local measurements of the Hubble constant H 0 ??4 km s ?? Mpc ?? and H 0 ??7 km s ?? Mpc ?? inferred from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In Chain EDE, the Universe undergoes a series of first order phase transitions, starting at a high energy vacuum in a potential, and tunneling down through a chain of every lower energy metastable minima. As in all EDE models, the contribution of the vacuum energy to the total energy density of the universe is initially negligible, but reaches ??0% around matter-radiation equality, before cosmological data require it to redshift away quickly -- at least as fast as radiation. We indeed obtain this required behavior with a series of N tunneling events, and show that for N>600 the phase transitions are rapid enough to allow fast percolation and thereby avoid large scale anisotropies in the CMB. We construct a specific example of Chain EDE featuring a scalar field in a quasiperiodic potential (a tilted cosine), which is ubiquitous in axion physics and, therefore, carries strong theoretical motivation. Interestingly, the energy difference between vacua can be roughly the size of today's Dark Energy (meV scale). Therefore, the end result of Chain EDE could provide a natural explanation of Dark Energy, if the tunneling becomes extremely slow in the final step before the field reaches zero (or negative) energy. We discuss a simple mechanism which can stop the scalar field in the desired minimum. Thus Chain EDE offers the exciting prospect to explain EDE and Dark Energy by the same scalar field.

Although interesting in themselves, extragalactic sources emitting in the microwave range (mainly radio-loud active galactic nuclei and dusty galaxies) are also considered a contaminant from the point of view of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments. These sources appear as unresolved point-like objects in CMB measurements because of the limited resolution of CMB experiments. Amongst other issues, point-like sources are known to obstruct the reconstruction of the lensing potential, and can hinder the detection of the Primordial Gravitational Wave Background for low values of r . Therefore, extragalactic point-source detection and subtraction is a fundamental part of the component separation process necessary to achieve some of the science goals set for the next generation of CMB experiments. As a previous step to their removal, in this work we present a new filter based on steerable wavelets that allows the characterization of the emission of these extragalactic sources. Instead of the usual approach of working in polarization maps of the Stokes' Q and U parameters, the proposed filter operates on E- and B-mode polarization maps. In this way, it benefits from the lower intensity that, both, the CMB, and the galactic foreground emission, present in B-modes to improve its performance. To demonstrate its potential, we have applied the filter to simulations of the future PICO satellite, and we predict that, for the regions of fainter galactic foreground emission in the 30 GHz and 155 GHz bands of PICO, our filter will be able to characterize sources down to a minimum polarization intensity of, respectively, 125 pK and 14 pK. Adopting a Π=0.02 polarization degree, these values correspond to 169 mJy and 288 mJy intensities.

Context. Biases in mass measurements of galaxy clusters are one of the major limiting systematics in constraining cosmology with clusters. Aims. We aim to demonstrate that the systematics associated with cluster gravitational potentials are smaller than the hydrostatic mass bias and that cluster potentials could therefore be a good alternative to cluster masses in cosmological studies. Methods. Using cosmological simulations of galaxy clusters, we compute the biases in the hydrostatic mass (HE mass) and those in the gravitational potential, reconstructed from measurements at X-ray and millimeter wavelengths. In particular, we investigate the effects of the presence of substructures and of non-thermal pressure support on both the HE mass and the reconstructed potential. Results. We find that the bias in the reconstructed potential (6%) is less than that of the HE mass (13%), and that the scatter in the reconstructed potential decreases by about 35% with respect to that in the HE mass. Conclusions. This study shows that characterizing galaxy clusters by their gravitational potential is a promising alternative to using cluster masses in cluster cosmology.

Primordial black holes (PBHs), formed out of large overdensities in the early Universe, are a viable dark matter (DM) candidate over a broad range of masses. Ultra-light, asteroid-mass PBHs with masses around 10 17 g are particularly interesting as current observations allow them to constitute the entire DM density. PBHs in this mass range emit ??MeV photons via Hawking radiation which can directly be detected by the gamma ray telescopes, such as the upcoming AMEGO. In this work we forecast how well an instrument with the sensitivity of AMEGO will be able to detect, or rule out, PBHs as a DM candidate, by searching for their evaporating signature when marginalizing over the Galactic and extra-Galactic gamma-ray backgrounds. We find that an instrument with the sensitivity of AMEGO could exclude non-rotating PBHs as the only DM component for masses up to 7? 10 17 g at 95% confidence level (C.L.) for a monochromatic mass distribution, improving upon current bounds by nearly an order of magnitude. The forecasted constraints are more stringent for PBHs that have rotation, or which follow extended mass distributions.

One of the non-canonical descriptions of scalar field dark energy is the tachyon. The present work is devoted to study the dynamics of dark matter overdensity in a conformally coupled tachyon field dark energy model. The model is tuned to mimic the Λ CDM cosmology at background level. The semi-analytic spherical collapse model of dark matter overdensity is adopted to study the nonlinear evolution. The effects of non-minimal coupling in the energy budget on the clustering of dark matter is investigated. It is observed that the growth rate of matter overdensity is higher in presence of the non-minimal coupling. The critical density at collapse is suppressed in case of interaction. Further the number counts of dark matter halos or galaxy clusters along redshift are studied using the Press-Schechter and Sheth- Tormen halo mass functions. Suppression in the number of dark matter halos is observed when the interaction is allowed. A comparison of cluster number count in the present model and Λ CDM is carried out. The present model allowing the interaction produces much lower number of galaxy clusters compared to Λ CDM, but without interaction the cluster number count is slightly higher than Λ CDM cluster count.

We present a sample of luminous red-sequence galaxies to study the large-scale structure in the fourth data release of the Kilo-Degree Survey. The selected galaxies are defined by a red-sequence template, in the form of a data-driven model of the colour-magnitude relation conditioned on redshift. In this work, the red-sequence template is built using the broad-band optical+near infrared photometry of KiDS-VIKING and the overlapping spectroscopic data sets. The selection process involves estimating the red-sequence redshifts, assessing the purity of the sample, and estimating the underlying redshift distributions of redshift bins. After performing the selection, we mitigate the impact of survey properties on the observed number density of galaxies by assigning photometric weights to the galaxies. We measure the angular two-point correlation function of the red galaxies in four redshift bins, and constrain the large scale bias of our red-sequence sample assuming a fixed Λ CDM cosmology. We find consistent linear biases for two luminosity-threshold samples (dense and luminous). We find that our constraints are well characterized by the passive evolution model.

The shorten sound horizon scale at the recombination epoch by introducing extra energy components such as the extra radiation or early dark energy (EDE) is a simple approach to so-called the Hubble tension. We compare EDE models, an extra radiation model and an EDE and extra radiation co-existing model with paying attention to the fit to big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). We find that a fit to BBN in EDE models also is somewhat poorer than that in the ? CDM model, because the increased inferred baryon asymmetry leads to smaller deuterium abundance. We find that an extra radiation-EDE co-existing model indicates the largest present Hubble parameter H 0 between models studied. We also the examine data sets dependence, whether we include BBN or not. The difference in an extra radiation model is 3.22< N eff <3.49(68%) for data sets without BBN and 3.16< N eff <3.40(68%) for data sets with BBN, and is so large that the 1? border of the larger side becomes the 2? border.

There are several methods for model selection in cosmology which have at least two major goals, that of finding the correct model or predicting well. In this work we discuss through a study of well-known model selection methods like Akaike information criterion (AIC), Bayesian information criterion (BIC), deviance information criterion (DIC) and Bayesian evidence, how these different goals are pursued in each paradigm. We also apply another method for model selection which less seen in cosmological literature, the Cross-validation method. Using these methods we will compare two different scenarios in cosmology, ? CDM model and dynamical dark energy. We show that each of the methods tends to different results in model selection. While BIC and Bayesian evidence overrule the dynamical dark energy scenarios with 2 or 3 extra degree of freedom, the DIC and cross-validation method prefer these dynamical models to ? CDM model. Assuming the numerical results of different analysis and combining cosmological and statistical aspects of the subject, we propose cross-validation as an interesting method for model selection in cosmology that can lead to different results in comparison with usual methods of model selection.

We compare the spectrum of the stochastic gravitational wave background produced in several models of cosmic strings with the common-spectrum process recently reported by NANOGrav. We discuss theoretical uncertainties in computing such a background, and show that despite such uncertainties, cosmic strings remain a good explanation for the potential signal, but the consequences for cosmic string parameters depend on the model. Superstrings could also explain the signal, but only in a restricted parameter space where their network behavior is effectively identical to that of ordinary cosmic strings.