118580324
Proliferation of the Phoenix Universe
Cyclic cosmology, in which the universe will experience alternating periods of gravitational collapse and expansion, provides an interesting understanding of the early universe and is described as "The Phoenix Universe". In usual expectation, the cyclic universe should be homogeneous, however, with studying the cosmological perturbations, we find that the amplification of curvature perturbations on the large scale may rip the homogeneous universe into a fissiparous multiverse after one or several cycles. Thus, we suggest that the cyclic universe not only rebirths in the "fire" and will never ended, like the Phoenix, but also proliferates eternally.
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.
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.
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.
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.
118595684
Next-to-leading order QCD corrections to the single top quark production via model-independent tqg flavor-changing neutral-current couplings at hadron colliders
We present the calculations of the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD effects on the single top productions induced by model-independent tqg flavor-changing neutral-current couplings at hadron colliders. Our results show that, for the tcg coupling, the NLO QCD corrections can enhance the total cross sections by about 60% and 30%, and for the tug coupling by about 50% and 20% at the Tevatron and LHC, respectively, which means that the NLO corrections can increase the experimental sensitivity to the flavor-changing neutral-current couplings by about 10%-30%. Moreover, the NLO corrections reduce the dependence of the total cross sections on the renormalization or factorization scale significantly, which lead to increased confidence on the theoretical predictions. Besides, we also evaluate the NLO corrections to several important kinematic distributions, and find that for most of them the NLO corrections are almost the same and do not change the shape of the distributions.
119461087
Scalar Mesons a0(1450) and sigma(600) from Lattice QCD
We study the a0 and sigma mesons with the overlap fermion in the chiral regime with the pion mass as low as 182 MeV in the quenched approximation. After the eta'pi ghost states are separated, we find that the a0 mass with q\bar{q} interpolation field to be almost independent of the quark mass in the region below the strange quark mass. The chirally extrapolated results are consistent with a0(1450) being the u\bar{d} meson and K0*(1430) being the u\bar{s} meson with calculated masses at 1.42+_0.13 GeV and 1.41+_ 0.12 GeV respectively. We also calculate the scalar mesonium with a tetraquark interpolation field. In addition to the two pion scattering states, we find a state at around 550 MeV. Through the study of volume dependence, we confirm that this state is a one-particle state, in contrast to the two-pion scattering states. This suggests that the observed state is a tetraquark mesonium which is quite possibly the sigma(600) meson.
118804860
Signature of large extra dimensions from Z boson pair production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider
We study the Z boson pair production mediated by the Kaluza-Klein (KK) graviton in large extra dimensions (LED) at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We use the partial wave unitarity to discuss the constraints on the process energy scale in order to give a self-consistent calculation. We find that the LED contributions can enhance the Z boson pair production cross sections significantly when the fundamental scale M{sub S} of the large extra dimensions is up to several TeV. We also show that the kinematic distributions of the LED signals are greatly different from the standard model ones and the LHC can probe the M{sub S} values up to 4.3-5.6 TeV at 3{sigma} level depending on the number of the extra dimensions.
118385962
Possibility of $\Sigma_{c}(2800)$ and $\Lambda_{c}(2940)^{+}$ as $S$-wave $D^{(*)}N$ molecular states
In this talk, we give a brief review of our work studying the possibility of $\Sigma_{c}(2800)$ and $\Lambda_{c}(2940)^{+}$ as $S$-wave $D^{(*)}N$ molecular states from QCD sum rules.
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.