Tejaswi Venumadhav

Sterile neutrino dark matter: Weak interactions in the strong coupling epoch

We perform a detailed study of the weak interactions of standard model neutrinos with the primordial plasma and their effect on the resonant production of sterile neutrino dark matter. Motivated by issues in cosmological structure formation on small scales, and reported X-ray signals that could be due to sterile neutrino decay, we consider 7 keV-scale sterile neutrinos. Oscillation-driven production of such sterile neutrinos occurs at temperatures T ≳ 100 MeV, where we study two significant effects of weakly charged species in the primordial plasma: (1) the redistribution of an input lepton asymmetry; (2) the opacity for active neutrinos. We calculate the redistribution analytically above and below the quark-hadron transition, and match with lattice QCD calculations through the transition. We estimate opacities due to tree level processes involving leptons and quarks above the quark-hadron transition, and the most important mesons below the transition. We report final sterile neutrino dark matter phase space densities that are significantly influenced by these effects, and yet relatively robust to remaining uncertainties in the nature of the quark-hadron transition. We also provide transfer functions for cosmological density fluctuations with cutoffs at k ≃ 10 h Mpc^(−1), that are relevant to galactic structure formation.

THE STABILITY OF TIDALLY DEFORMED NEUTRON STARS TO THREE- AND FOUR-MODE COUPLING

It has recently been suggested that the tidal deformation of a neutron star excites daughter p- and g-modes to large amplitudes via a quasi-static instability. This would remove energy from the tidal bulge, resulting in dissipation and possibly affecting the phase evolution of inspiralling binary neutron stars and hence the extraction of binary parameters from gravitational wave observations. This instability appears to arise because of a large three-mode interaction among the tidal mode and high-order p- and g-modes of similar radial wavenumber. We show that additional four-mode interactions enter into the analysis at the same order as the three-mode terms previously considered. We compute these four-mode couplings by finding a volume-preserving coordinate transformation that relates the energy of a tidally deformed star to that of a radially perturbed spherical star. Using this method, we relate the four-mode coupling to three-mode couplings and show that there is a near-exact cancellation between the destabilizing effect of the three-mode interactions and the stabilizing effect of the four-mode interaction. We then show that the equilibrium tide is stable against the quasi-static decay into daughter p- and g-modes to leading order. The leading deviation from the quasi-static approximation due to orbital motion of the binary is considered; while it may slightly spoil the near-cancellation, any resulting instability timescale is at least of order the gravitational wave inspiral time. We conclude that the p-/g-mode coupling does not lead to a quasi-static instability, and does not impact the phase evolution of gravitational waves from binary neutron stars.

New probe of magnetic fields in the prereionization epoch. I. Formalism

We propose a method of measuring extremely weak magnetic fields in the intergalactic medium prior to and during the epoch of cosmic reionization. The method utilizes the Larmor precession of spin-polarized neutral hydrogen in the triplet state of the hyperfine transition. This precession leads to a systematic change in the brightness temperature fluctuations of the 21-cm line from the high-redshift universe, and thus the statistics of these fluctuations encode information about the magnetic field the atoms are immersed in. The method is most suited to probing fields that are coherent on large scales; in this paper, we consider a homogenous magnetic field over the scale of the 21-cm fluctuations. Due to the long lifetime of the triplet state of the 21-cm transition, this technique is naturally sensitive to extremely weak field strengths, of order 10^(−19)  G at a reference redshift of ∼20 (or 10^(−21)  G if scaled to the present day). Therefore, this might open up the possibility of probing primordial magnetic fields just prior to reionization. If the magnetic fields are much stronger, it is still possible to use this method to infer their direction, and place a lower limit on their strength. In this paper (Paper I in a series on this effect), we perform detailed calculations of the microphysics behind this effect, and take into account all the processes that affect the hyperfine transition, including radiative decays, collisions, and optical pumping by Lyman-α photons. We conclude with an analytic formula for the brightness temperature of linear-regime fluctuations in the presence of a magnetic field, and discuss its limiting behavior for weak and strong fields.

New probe of magnetic fields in the pre-reionization epoch. II. Detectability

In the first paper of this series, we proposed a novel method to probe large–scale intergalactic magnetic fields during the cosmic Dark Ages, using 21–cm tomography. This method relies on the effect of spin alignment of hydrogen atoms in a cosmological setting, and on the effect of magnetic precession of the atoms on the statistics of the 21-cm brightness-temperature fluctuations. In this paper, we forecast the sensitivity of future tomographic surveys to detecting magnetic fields using this method. For this purpose, we develop a minimum-variance estimator formalism to capture the characteristic anisotropy signal using the two-point statistics of the brightness-temperature fluctuations. We find that, depending on the reionization history, and subject to the control of systematics from foreground subtraction, an array of dipole antennas in a compact-grid configuration with a collecting area slightly exceeding one square kilometer can achieve a 1σ detection of ∼10^(−21)  Gauss comoving (scaled to present-day value) within three years of observation. Using this method, tomographic 21–cm surveys could thus probe ten orders of magnitude below current cosmic microwave background constraints on primordial magnetic fields, and provide exquisite sensitivity to large-scale magnetic fields in situ at high redshift.

A PRACTICAL THEOREM ON USING INTERFEROMETRY TO MEASURE THE GLOBAL 21 cm SIGNAL

The sky-averaged, or global, background of redshifted

Microlensing of Extremely Magnified Stars near Caustics of Galaxy Clusters

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Probing Dark Matter Subhalos in Galaxy Clusters Using Highly Magnified Stars

cm radiation is expected to be a rich source of information on cosmological reheating and reionizaton. However, measuring the signal is technically challenging: one must extract a small, frequency-dependent signal from under much brighter spectrally smooth foregrounds. Traditional approaches to study the global signal have used single antennas, which require one to calibrate out the frequency-dependent structure in the overall system gain (due to internal reflections, for example) as well as remove the noise bias from auto-correlating a single amplifier output. This has motivated proposals to measure the signal using cross-correlations in interferometric setups, where additional calibration techniques are available. In this paper we focus on the general principles driving the sensitivity of the interferometric setups to the global signal. We prove that this sensitivity is directly related to two characteristics of the setup: the cross-talk between readout channels (i.e. the signal picked up at one antenna when the other one is driven) and the correlated noise due to thermal fluctuations of lossy elements (e.g. absorbers or the ground) radiating into both channels. Thus in an interferometric setup, one cannot suppress cross-talk and correlated thermal noise without reducing sensitivity to the global signal by the same factor -- instead, the challenge is to characterize these effects and their frequency dependence. We illustrate our general theorem by explicit calculations within toy setups consisting of two short dipole antennas in free space and above a perfectly reflecting ground surface, as well as two well-separated identical lossless antennas arranged to achieve zero cross-talk.

Stability of small-scale baryon perturbations during cosmological recombination

Recent observations of lensed galaxies at cosmological distances have detected individual stars that are extremely magnified when crossing the caustics of lensing clusters. In idealized cluster lenses with smooth mass distributions, two images of a star of radius

Cosmology with the SPHEREX All-Sky Spectral Survey

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Effect of lensing magnification on the apparent distribution of black hole mergers

approaching a caustic brighten as