19943745
Spatial averaging limit of covariant macroscopic gravity: Scalar corrections to the cosmological equations
It is known that any explicit averaging scheme of the type essential for describing the large scale behavior of the Universe must necessarily yield corrections to the Einstein equations applied in the cosmological setting. The question of whether or not the resulting corrections to the Einstein equations are significant is still a subject of debate, partly due to possible ambiguities in the averaging schemes available. In particular, it has been argued in the literature that the effects of averaging could be gauge artifacts. We apply the formalism of Zalaletdinov's macroscopic gravity (MG), which is a fully covariant and nonperturbative averaging scheme, in an attempt to construct gauge independent corrections to the standard Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) equations. We find that whereas one cannot escape the problem of dependence on one gauge choice\char22{}which is inherent in the assumption of large scale homogeneity and isotropy\char22{}it is however possible to construct space-time scalar corrections to the standard FLRW equations. This partially removes the criticism concerning the corrections being gauge artifacts. For a particular initial choice of gauge which simplifies the formalism, we explicitly construct these scalars in terms of the underlying inhomogeneous geometry, and incidentally demonstrate that the formal structure of the corrections with this gauge choice is identical to that of analogous corrections derived by Buchert in the context of spatial averaging of scalars.
117870436
Halo bias in the excursion set approach with correlated steps
In the excursion set approach, halo abundances and clustering are closely related. This relation is exploited in many modern methods which seek to constrain cosmological parameters on the basis of the observed spatial distribution of clusters. However, to obtain analytic expressions for these quantities, most excursion-set-based predictions ignore the fact that, although different k modes in the initial Gaussian field are uncorrelated, this is not true in real space: the values of the density field at a given spatial position, when smoothed on different real-space scales, are correlated in a non-trivial way. We show that when the excursion set approach is extended to include such correlations, then one must be careful to account for the fact that the associated prediction for halo bias is explicitly a real-space quantity. Therefore, care must be taken while comparing the predictions of this approach with measurements in simulations, which are typically made in Fourier space. We show how to correct for this effect, and demonstrate that ignorance of this effect in recent analyses of halo bias has led to incorrect conclusions and biased constraints.
5059816
Cosmological sector for localized mass and spin in 2+1 dimensional topologically massive gravity
Abstract The cosmological sector to the full non-linear topologically massive gravity (TMG) is obtained for localized sources of mass m and spin σ besides the asymptotically spinning conical flat sector previously obtained [A. Edery, M.B. Paranjape, gr-qc/9606029, to be published]. In a small region near but outside the sources, the metric resembles the spinning conical flat metric but we find that the mass m creates a negative deficit angle of 3 m as opposed to m . Furthermore, it is not possible to recover the results of pure Einstein gravity in the limit μ →∞ unlike the flat sector.