117031507
Preheating in a DBI Inflation Model
We study the preheating process in a model of DBI inflation with a DBI-type inflaton coupling to a canonical entropy field. At the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around its vacuum which can arise from an infrared cutoff parameter on the warp factor and correspondingly the evolution of its fluctuations can be approximately described by a generalized Hill's equation in third order. We study the field fluctuations numerically and show that they could grow exponentially since the instability bands commonly exist in the DBI models if the amplitudes of background oscillations are of order or larger than the cutoff parameter. Our numerical result also reveals that the particle excitation of the matter field is more dramatic than that in usual case since the parametric resonance lasts longer when the effect of a warp factor is taken into account. Therefore, we conclude that the preheating process in the model of DBI inflation could be more efficient than that in standard inflation models.
118608841
Preheating in bubble collisions
In a landscape with metastable minima, the bubbles will inevitably nucleate. We show that when the bubbles collide, due to the dramatic oscillation of the field at the collision region, the energy deposited in the bubble walls can be efficiently released by the explosive production of the particles. In this sense, the collision of bubbles is actually highly inelastic. The cosmological implications of this result are discussed.
59151648
Topological Defects from the Multiverse
Many theories of the early universe predict the existence of a multiverse where bubbles continuously nucleate giving rise to observers in their interior. In this paper, we point out that topological defects of several dimensionalities will also be produced in de Sitter like regions of the multiverse. In particular, defects could be spontaneously nucleated in our parent vacuum. We study the evolution of these defects as they collide with and propagate inside of our bubble. We estimate the present distribution of defects in the observable part of the universe. The expected number of such nearby defects turns out to be quite small, even for the highest nucleation rate. We also study collisions of strings and domain walls with our bubble in our past light cone. We obtain simulated full-sky maps of the loci of such collisions, and find their angular size distribution. Similarly to what happens in the case of bubble collisions, the prospect of detecting any collisions of our bubble with ambient defects is greatly enhanced in the case where the cosmological constant of our parent vacuum is much higher than the vacuum energy density during inflation in our bubble.
119192406
Rotating a curvaton brane in a warped throat
In this paper we study a curvaton model obtained by considering a probe anti-D3-brane with angular motion at the bottom of a KS throat with approximate isometries. We calculate the spectrum of curvature perturbations and the non-Gaussianities of this model. Specifically, we consider the limit of relativistic rotation of the curvaton brane which leads to a small sound speed, and thus it can be viewed as an implementation of the DBI-curvaton mechanism. We find that the primordial power spectrum is nearly scale-invariant while the non-Gaussianity of local type is sizable and that of equilateral type is usually large and negative. Moreover, we study both the theoretical and observational constraints on this model, and find that there exists a sizable allowed region for the phase space of this model.
45784849
Past incompleteness of a bouncing multiverse
According to classical GR, Anti-de Sitter (AdS) bubbles in the multiverse terminate in big crunch singularities. It has been conjectured, however, that the fundamental theory may resolve these singularities and replace them by nonsingular bounces. This may have important implications for the beginning of the multiverse. Geodesics in cosmological spacetimes are known to be past-incomplete, as long as the average expansion rate along the geodesic is positive, but it is not clear that the latter condition is satisfied if the geodesic repeatedly passes through crunching AdS bubbles. We investigate this issue in a simple multiverse model, where the spacetime consists of a patchwork of FRW regions. The conclusion is that the spacetime is still past-incomplete, even in the presence of AdS bounces.
119215973
Non-singular bounce transitions in the multiverse
According to classical GR, negative-energy (AdS) bubbles in the multiverse terminate in big crunch singularities. It has been conjectured, however, that the fundamental theory may resolve these singularities and replace them by non-singular bounces. Here we explore possible dynamics of such bounces using a simple modification of the Friedmann equation, which ensures that the scale factor bounces when the matter density reaches some critical value ρ{sub c}. This is combined with a simple scalar field 'landscape', where the energy barriers between different vacua are small compared to ρ{sub c}. We find that the bounce typically results in a transition to another vacuum, with a scalar field displacement Δφ ∼ 1 in Planck units. If the new vacuum is AdS, we have another bounce, and so on, until the field finally transits to a positive-energy (de Sitter) vacuum. We also consider perturbations about the homogeneous solution and discuss some of their amplification mechanisms (e.g., tachyonic instability and parametric resonance). For a generic potential, these mechanisms are much less efficient than in models of slow-roll inflation. But the amplification may still be strong enough to cause the bubble to fragment into a mosaic of different vacua.
118483519
Hydrodynamics with conserved current via AdS/CFT correspondence in the Maxwell-Gauss-Bonnet gravity
Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, we study the hydrodynamics with conserved current from the dual Maxwell-Gauss-Bonnet gravity. After constructing the perturbative solution to the first order based on the boosted black brane solution in the bulk Maxwell-Gauss-Bonnet gravity, we extract the stress tensor and conserved current of the dual conformal fluid on its boundary, and also find the effect of Gauss-Bonnet term on the dual conformal fluid. Our results show that the Gauss-Bonnet term can affect the parameters such as the shear viscosity $\eta$, entropy density $s$, thermal conductivity $\kappa$ and electrical conductivity $\sigma$. However, it does not affect the so-called Wiedemann-Franz law which relates $\kappa$ to $\sigma$, while it affects the ratio $\eta/s$. In addition, another interesting result is that the $\eta/s$ can also be affected by the bulk Maxwell field in our case, which is consistent with some previous results predicted through the Kubo formula. Moreover, the anomalous magnetic and vortical effects by adding the Chern-Simons term are also considered in our case in the Maxwell-Gauss-Bonnet gravity.
118309222
Locality and Scaling of Quenched Overlap Fermions
The overlap fermion offers the tremendous advantage of exact chiral symmetry on the lattice, but is numerically intensive. This can be made affordable while still providing large lattice volumes, by using coarse lattice spacing, given that good scaling and localization properties are established. Here, using overlap fermions on quenched Iwasaki gauge configurations, we demonstrate directly that the overlap Dirac operator's range is comfortably small in lattice units for each of the lattice spacings 0.20 fm, 0.17 fm, and 0.13 fm (and scales to zero in physical units in the continuum limit). In particular, our direct results contradict recent speculation that an inverse lattice spacing of 1 GeV is too low to have satisfactory localization. Furthermore, hadronic masses (available on the two coarser lattices) scale very well.
121299160
Properties of the FLIC overlap quark propagator
FLIC overlap fermions are a type of smeared link action in which the FLIC (Fat Link Irrelevant Clover) fermion action is used as the overlap kernel instead of the standard Wilson fermion action. We study the (quenched) quark propagator in momentum space using the FLIC overlap fermion action, and compare it to that of the Wilson overlap. We find that the two actions have different discretization errors which decrease with the quark mass. We also examine the FLIC overlap quark propagator within the dynamical kernel approximation, where the FLIC Overlap action is used for the valence quarks and the FLIC fermion action is used for the quark sea. Our results indicate that the quark propagator is relatively insensitive to the fermion sea.
118448190
Improved QCD sum rule study of $Z_{c}(3900)$ as a $\bar{D}D^{*}$ molecular state
In the framework of QCD sum rules, we present an improved study of our previous work [Phys. Rev. D 80, 056004 (2009)], particularly on the $\overline{D}{D}^{*}$ molecular state, to investigate the possibility that the newly observed ${Z}_{c}(3900)$ is a $S$-wave $\overline{D}{D}^{*}$ molecular state. To ensure the quality of QCD sum rule analysis, contributions of up to dimension nine are calculated to test the convergence of operator product expansion (OPE). We find that the two-quark condensate $⟨\overline{q}q⟩$ is very large and makes the standard OPE convergence (i.e. the perturbative at least larger than each condensate contribution) happen at very large values of Borel parameters. By releasing the rigid OPE convergence criterion, one could find that the OPE convergence is still under control. We arrive at the numerical result $3.86\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.27\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{GeV}$ for $\overline{D}{D}^{*}$, which agrees with the mass of ${Z}_{c}(3900)$ and could support the explanation of ${Z}_{c}(3900)$ in terms of a $S$-wave $\overline{D}{D}^{*}$ molecular state.
118623641
Threshold resummation effects in neutral Higgs boson production by bottom quark fusion at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
We investigate the QCD effects in the production of neutral Higgs bosons via bottom quark fusion in both the standard model and the minimal supersymmetric standard model at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. We include the next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections (including supersymmetric QCD) and the threshold resummation effects. We use the soft-collinear effective theory to resum the large logarithms near threshold from soft gluon emission. Our results show that the resummation effects can enhance the total cross sections by about 5% compared with the NLO results.