12348580
Cosmological perturbations and classical change of signature.
Cosmological perturbations on a manifold admitting signature change are studied. The background solution consists in a Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson- Walker (FLRW) Universe filled by a constant scalar field playing the role of a cosmological constant. It is shown that no regular solution exist satisfying the junction conditions at the surface of change. The comparison with similar studies in quantum cosmology is made.
15021448
Amplitude of superhorizon cosmological perturbations
We study the influence of reheating on super-horizon density perturbations and gravitational waves. We correct wrong claims [L. P. Grishchuk Phys. Rev. D 50, 7154 (1994) and gr-qc/9801011] about the joining of perturbations at cosmological transitions and about the quantization of cosmological perturbations.
31268700
Quintessence with two energy scales
We study quintessence models using low energy supergravity inspired from string theory. We consider effective supergravity with two scales m_S, the string scale, and m_PL, the Planck scale and show that quintessence naturally arises from a supersymmetry breaking hidden sector. As long as supersymmetry is broken by the $F$-term of a Polonyi-like field coupled to the quintessence field in the K\"ahler potential we find that the Ratra-Peebles potential and its supergravity version are generic predictions. This requires that the string scale decouples from the Planck scale, m_S << m_PL. In the context of supergravity, the potential possesses a minimum induced by the supergravity corrections to the Ratra-Peebles potential at low redshifts. We study the physical consequences of the presence of this minimum.
118612073
Generation of gravitational waves during early structure formation between cosmic inflation and reheating
In the pre-reheating era, following cosmic inflation and preceding radiation domination, the energy density may be dominated by an oscillating massive scalar condensate, such as is the case for V = m22/2 chaotic inflation. We have found in a previous paper that during this period, a wide range of sub-Hubble scale perturbations are subject to a preheating instability, leading to the growth of density perturbations ultimately collapsing to form non-linear structures. We compute here the gravitational wave signal due to these structures in the linear limit and present estimates for emission in the non-linear limit due to various effects: the collapse of halos, the tidal interactions, the evaporation during the conversion of the inflaton condensate into radiation and finally the ensuing turbulent cascades. The gravitational wave signal could be rather large and potentially testable by future detectors.
119240885
Constraints on moduli cosmology from the production of dark matter and baryon isocurvature fluctuations
We set constraints on moduli cosmology from the production of dark matter—radiation and baryon— radiation isocurvature fluctuations through modulus decay, assuming the modulus remains light during inflation. We find that the moduli problem becomes worse at the perturbative level as a significant part of the parameter space m σ (modulus mass)—σ inf (modulus vacuum expectation value at the end of inflation) is constrained by the nonobservation of significant isocurvature fluctuations. We discuss in detail the evolution of the modulus vacuum expectation value and perturbations, in particular, the consequences of Hubble scale corrections to the modulus potential, and the stochastic motion of the modulus during inflation. We show, in particular, that a high modulus mass scale m σ ≳ 100 TeV, which allows the modulus to evade big bang nucleosynthesis constraints is strongly constrained at the perturbative level. We find that generically, solving the moduli problem requires the inflationary scale to be much smaller than 10 13 GeV.
14965415
Best unbiased estimators for the three point correlators of the cosmic microwave background radiation
Measuring the three-point correlators of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies could help to get a handle on the level of non-Gaussianity present in the observational data sets and therefore would strongly constrain models of the early Universe. However, typically, the expected non-Gaussian signal is very small. Therefore, one has to face the problem of extracting it from the noise, in particular from the ``cosmic variance'' noise. For this purpose, one has to construct the best unbiased estimators for the three-point correlators that are needed for concrete detection of non-Gaussian features. In this article, we study this problem for both the CMB third moment and the CMB angular bispectrum. We emphasize that knowledge of the best estimator for the former does not permit one to infer the best estimator for the latter and vice versa. We present the corresponding best unbiased estimators in both cases and compute their corresponding cosmic variances.
17368592
Raising the unification scale in supersymmetry.
In the minimal supersymmetric standard model, the three gauge couplings appear to unify at a mass scale near 2{times}10{sup 16} GeV. We investigate the possibility that intermediate scale particle thresholds modify the running couplings so as to increase the unification scale. By requiring consistency of this scenario, we derive some constraints on the particle content and locations of the intermediate thresholds. There are remarkably few acceptable solutions with a single cleanly defined intermediate scale far below the unification scale.
23673028
New information on parton distributions.
New data on structure functions from deep-inelastic scattering provide new information on parton distributions, particularly in the 0.01[lt][ital x][lt]0.1 interval. This has important implications for predictions for the DESY [ital ep] collider HERA and for present and future high-energy hadron colliders. We present the results of updated fits to all available precision structure function and related data. We focus in particular on two issues: (a) the increase in the sea-quark distribution at small [ital x] implied by new [ital F][sub 2] data from the New Muon Collaboration, and its implications for other processes, and (b) the evidence for SU(2)-symmetry breaking in the light-quark sea. We show that although good fits can be obtained with or without this symmetry breaking, more physically reasonable parton distributions are obtained if we allow [ital [bar d]][gt][ital [bar u]] at small [ital x]. With the inclusion of the latest deep-inelastic data we find [alpha][sub [ital s]]([ital M][sub [ital Z]])=0.111[sub [minus]0.005][sup +0.004]. We also show how [ital W], [ital Z], and Drell-Yan production at [ital [bar p]p] colliders can give information on parton distributions.
15021862
Low-energy supersymmetry with D-term contributions to scalar masses.
We investigate how the predictions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model are modified by D-term contributions to soft scalar masses, which arise whenever the rank of the gauge group at very high energies is greater than four. We give a parameterization of the most general such contributions that can occur when the unbroken gauge symmetry is an arbitrary subgroup of E_6, and show how the D-term contributions leave their imprint on physics at ordinary energies. We impose experimental constraints on the resulting parameter space and discuss some features of the resulting supersymmetric spectrum which differ from the predictions obtained with universal boundary conditions on scalar masses near the Planck scale. These include relations between squark and slepton masses; the behavior of $\sin^2 (\beta-\alpha)$ (which determines the production cross-section for the lightest Higgs scalar boson at an e+e- collider) and the mass of the pseudoscalar Higgs bosons; R_b [the ratio $\Gamma(Z -> b\overline b)/\Gamma(Z -> hadrons)$; and mass differences between charginos and neutralinos.
18738644
Observable jets from the BFKL chain.
We derive a modified form of the BFKL equation which enables the structure of the gluon emissions to be studied in small {ital x} deep-inelastic scattering. The equation incorporates the resummation of the virtual and unresolved real gluon emissions. We solve the equation to calculate the number of small {ital x} deep-inelastic events containing 0,1,2,... resolved gluon jets, that is, jets with transverse momenta {ital q}{sub {ital T}}{gt}{mu}. We study the jet decomposition for different choices of the jet resolution parameter {mu}. {copyright} {ital 1996 The American Physical Society.}
16919657
Decoupling of the epsilon -scalar mass in softly broken supersymmetry.
It has been shown recently that the introduction of an unphysical [epsilon]-scalar mass [ital [tilde m]] is necessary for the proper renormalization of softly broken supersymmetric theories by dimensional reduction (DR). In these theories, both the two-loop [beta] functions of the scalar masses and their one-loop finite corrections depend on [ital [tilde m]][sup 2]. We find, however, that the dependence on [ital [tilde m]][sup 2] can be completely removed by slightly modifying the DR renormalization scheme. We also show that previous DR calculations of one-loop corrections in supersymmetry which ignored the [ital [tilde m]][sup 2] contribution correspond to using this modified scheme.