No Arabic abstract
Gravitational particle production in time variable metric of an expanding universe is efficient only when the Hubble parameter $H$ is not too small in comparison with the particle mass. In standard cosmology, the huge value of the Planck mass $M_{Pl}$ makes the mechanism phenomenologically irrelevant. On the other hand, in braneworld cosmology the expansion rate of the early universe can be much faster and many weakly interacting particles can be abundantly created. Cosmological implications are discussed.
We study transition rates and cross sections from first principles in a spatially flat radiation dominated cosmology. We consider a model of scalar particles to study scattering and heavy particle production from pair annihilation, drawing more general conclusions. The S-matrix formulation is ill suited to study these ubiquitous processes in a rapidly expanding cosmology. We introduce a physically motivated adiabatic expansion that relies on wavelengths much smaller than the particle horizon at a given time. The leading order in this expansion dominates the transition rates and cross sections. Several important and general results are direct consequences of the cosmological redshift and a finite particle horizon: i) a violation of local Lorentz invariance, ii) freeze-out of the production cross section at a finite time, iii) sub-threshold production of heavier particles as a consequence of the uncertainty in the local energy from a finite particle horizon, a manifestation of the emph{antizeno} effect. If heavy dark matter is produced via annihilation of a lighter species, sub-threshold production yields an enhanced abundance. We discuss several possible consequences of these effects.
In these lectures the present status of the so-called standard cosmological model, based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm is reviewed. Special emphasis is given to the origin of the cosmological perturbations we see today under the form of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies and the large scale structure and to the dark matter and dark energy puzzles.
In this paper we analyze the spectrum of the primordial gravitational waves (GWs) predicted in the Standard Model*Axion*Seesaw*Higgs portal inflation (SMASH) model, which was proposed as a minimal extension of the Standard Model that addresses five fundamental problems of particle physics and cosmology (inflation, baryon asymmetry, neutrino masses, strong CP problem, and dark matter) in one stroke. The SMASH model has a unique prediction for the critical temperature of the second order Peccei-Quinn (PQ) phase transition $T_c sim 10^8,mathrm{GeV}$ up to the uncertainty in the calculation of the axion dark matter abundance, implying that there is a drastic change in the equation of state of the universe at that temperature. Such an event is imprinted on the spectrum of GWs originating from the primordial tensor fluctuations during inflation and entering the horizon at $T sim T_c$, which corresponds to $f sim 1,mathrm{Hz}$, pointing to a best frequency range covered by future space-borne GW interferometers. We give a precise estimation of the effective relativistic degrees of freedom across the PQ phase transition and use it to evaluate the spectrum of GWs observed today. It is shown that the future high sensitivity GW experiment -- ultimate DECIGO -- can probe the nontrivial feature resulting from the PQ phase transition in this model.
We investigate the gravitational particle production in the bounce phase of Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC). We perform both analytical and numerical analysis of the particle production process in a LQC scenario with Bunch-Davies vacuum initial condition in the contracting phase. We obtain that if we extend the validity of the dressed metric approach beyond the limit of small backreaction in which it is well justified, this process would lead to a radiation dominated phase in the pre-inflationary phase of LQC. Our results indicate that the test field approximation, which is required in the truncation scheme used in the dressed metric approach, might not be a valid assumption in a LQC scenario with such initial conditions.
We investigate the Kaluza-Klein braneworld cosmology from the point of view of observers on the brane. We first generalize the Shiromizu-Maeda-Sasaki (SMS) equations to higher dimensions. As an application, we study a (4+n)-dimensional brane with n dimensions compactified on the brane, in a (5+n)-dimensional bulk. By assuming that the size of the internal space is static, that the bulk energy-momentum tensor can be neglected, we determine the effect of the bulk geometry on the Kaluza-Klein braneworld. Then we derive the effective Friedmann equation on the brane. It turns out that the Friedmann equation explicitly depends on the equation of state, in contrast to the braneworld in a 5-dimensional bulk spacetime. In particular, in a radiation-dominated era, the effective Newton constant depends on the scale factor logarithmically. If we include a pressureless matter on the brane, this dependence disappears after the radiation-matter equality. This may be interpreted as stabilization of the Newton constant by the matter on the brane. Our findings imply that the Kaluza-Klein braneworld cosmology is quite different from the conventional Kaluza-Klein cosmology even at low energy.