General Relativity And Quantum Cosmology

We study the motion of charged particles in a family of five-dimensional solutions describing either a black hole or topological star with a fifth compact dimension stabilised by a magnetic flux. The particle's trajectory is shown to move along the surface of a Poincaré cone. The radial motion shows a rich structure where the existence of various bound, plunging, or escaping trajectories depend on the constants of motion. Curves of energy and angular momentum corresponding to spherical orbits show a swallow-tail structure highly reminiscent to phase transitions of thermodynamics. When the momentum along the compact direction is varied, the is a critical point beyond which the swallow-tail kink disappears and becomes a smooth curve.

We study the dynamics of a cosmological model with a perfect fluid and N fields on a hyperbolic field space interacting via a symmetric potential. We list all late-time solutions, investigate their stability and briefly discuss predictions of the theory. Moreover, for the case of two scalar fields and an exponential potential we prove that the field equations are Liouville integrable and we provide for the first time the general solution for a region of the parameter space.

Instrumental and environmental transient noise bursts in gravitational-wave detectors, or glitches, may impair astrophysical observations by adversely affecting the sky localization and the parameter estimation of gravitational-wave signals. Denoising of detector data is especially relevant during low-latency operations because electromagnetic follow-up of candidate detections requires accurate, rapid sky localization and inference of astrophysical sources. NNETFIX is a machine learning-based algorithm designed to remove glitches detected in coincidence with transient gravitational-wave signals. NNETFIX uses artificial neural networks to estimate the portion of the data lost due to the presence of the glitch, which allows the recalculation of the sky localization of the astrophysical signal. The sky localization of the denoised data may be significantly more accurate than the sky localization obtained from the original data or by removing the portion of the data impacted by the glitch. We test NNETFIX in simulated scenarios of binary black hole coalescence signals and discuss the potential for its use in future low-latency LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA searches. In the majority of cases for signals with a high signal-to-noise ratio, we find that the overlap of the sky maps obtained with the denoised data and the original data is better than the overlap of the sky maps obtained with the original data and the data with the glitch removed.

In this Letter, we describe how a spectrum of entropic perturbations generated during a period of slow contraction can source a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature perturbations on length scales larger than the Hubble radius during the transition from slow contraction to a classical non-singular bounce (the `graceful exit' phase). The sourcing occurs naturally through higher-order scalar field kinetic terms common to classical (non-singular) bounce mechanisms. We present a concrete example in which, by the end of the graceful exit phase, the initial entropic fluctuations have become negligible and the curvature fluctuations have a nearly scale-invariant spectrum with an amplitude consistent with observations.

We present a novel method for sampling iso-likelihood contours in nested sampling using a type of machine learning algorithm known as normalising flows and incorporate it into our sampler nessai. Nessai is designed for problems where computing the likelihood is computationally expensive and therefore the cost of training a normalising flow is offset by the overall reduction in the number of likelihood evaluations. We validate our sampler on 128 simulated gravitational wave signals from compact binary coalescence and show that it produces unbiased estimates of the system parameters. Subsequently, we compare our results to those obtained with dynesty and find good agreement between the computed log-evidences whilst requiring 2.07 times fewer likelihood evaluations. We also highlight how the likelihood evaluation can be parallelised in nessai without any modifications to the algorithm. Finally, we outline diagnostics included in nessai and how these can be used to tune the sampler's settings.

We study solutions of the stellar structure equations for spherically symmetric objects in Palatini f(R)=R+α R 2 and f(R,Q)=R+α R 2 +βQ in the mass-radius region associated to neutron stars. We illustrate the potential impact of the R 2 and Q terms by studying a range of viable values of α and β . Similarly, we use different equations of state (SLy, FPS, HS(DD2) and HS(TMA)) as a simple way to account for the equation of state uncertainty. Our results show that for certain combinations of the α and β parameters and equation of state, the effect of modifications of general relativity on the properties of stars is sizeable. Therefore, with increasing accuracy in the determination of the equation of state for neutron stars, astrophysical observations may serve as discriminators of modifications of General Relativity.

Eccentric compact binaries pose not only a challenge for gravitational wave detectors, but also provide a probe into the nuclear equation of state if one of the objects is a neutron star. At the short pericenter passage, tidal interactions excite f-modes on the star, which in turn emit their own gravitational waves. We derive an analytic waveform for these stellar oscillations within the effective fly-by framework, modeling the emission to leading post-Newtonian order. At this order, the f-mode response can be written in a Fourier decomposition in terms of orbital harmonics, with the amplitudes of each harmonic depending on Hansen coefficients. Re-summing the harmonics of the f-mode results in a simple decaying harmonic oscillator, with the amplitude now determined by a Hansen coefficient of complex harmonic number. We compute the match M between the re-summed f-mode and numerical integrations of the tidal response, and find M>0.97 for systems with high orbital eccentriciy (e>0.9) and low semi-latus rectum (p<12M) . We further compare our model to modes generated from multiple pericenter passages under the effect of radiation reaction, and discuss issues related to the timing of pericenter passages and its impact on the model.

There is observational evidence that the spin axes of quasars in large quasar groups are correlated over hundreds of Mpc. This is found in the radio sector as well as in the optical range. There is not yet a satisfactory explanation of this "spooky" alignment. This alignment cannot be explained by mutual interaction at the time that quasars manifest themselves optically. A cosmological explanation could be possible by the formation of superconducting vortices (cosmic strings) in the early universe, just after the symmetry-breaking phase of the universe. We gathered from the NASA/IPAC and SIMBAD extragalactic databases the right ascension, declination, inclination, position angle and eccentricity of the host galaxies of 3 large quasar groups in order to obtain the azimuthal and polar angle of the spin vectors. The alignment of the azimuthal angle of the spin vectors of quasars in their host galaxy is confirmed in the large quasar group U1.27 and compared with two other groups in the vicinity, i.e., U1.11 and U1.28, investigated by Clowes2013. It is well possible that the azimuthal angle alignment fits the predicted azimuthal angle dependency in the theoretical model of the formation of general relativistic superconducting vortices, where the initial axial symmetry is broken just after the symmetry breaking of the scalar-gauge field.

This thesis focuses on modifications on Einstein's theory of General Relativity, which could explain the current problems in gravitation and cosmology. More specifically, modifications of the affine structure of the spacetime, which is the structure that tells us how to perform derivatives, are studied. These theories appear when imposing that the system must be invariant under the action of the local Poincaré group. Within these theories, their stability, the conditions for the appearance of singularities, the movement of fermions, and if it is possible to find different Black Hole solutions than in Einstein's theory, is explored. Moreover, a non-local extension of the mentioned modification is proposed, which can make the theory free of instabilities and singularities at the linear limit.

We study the particular case in which Extended Gravitational Decoupling does consist in consecutive deformations of temporal and spatial components of the metric, in Schwarzschild-like and isotropic coordinates. In the latter, we present two inequivalent ways to perform this 2-steps GD. This was done in such a way that the method may be applied to different seed solutions. As an example, we use Tolman IV as seed solution, in order to obtain two inequivalent physical solutions with anisotropy in the pressures in Schwarzschild like coordinates. In the isotropic sector, we obtained 4 different solutions with anisotropy in the pressures that satisfies physical acceptability conditions, using Gold III as seed solution.