No Arabic abstract
We study a static, spherically symmetric wormhole model whose metric coincides with that of the so-called Ellis wormhole but the material source of gravity consists of a perfect fluid with negative density and a source-free radial electric or magnetic field. For a certain class of fluid equations of state, it has been shown that this wormhole model is linearly stable under both spherically symmetric perturbations and axial perturbations of arbitrary multipolarity. A similar behavior is predicted for polar nonspherical perturbations. It thus seems to be the first example of a stable wormhole model in the framework of general relativity (at least without invoking phantom thin shells as wormhole sources).
We study linear cosmological perturbations in a previously introduced family of deformations of general relativity characterized by the absence of new degrees of freedom. The homogeneous and isotropic background in this class of theories is unmodified and is described by the usual Friedmann equations. The theory of cosmological perturbations is modified and the relevant deformation parameter has the dimension of length. Gravitational perturbations of the scalar type can be described by a certain relativistic potential related to the matter perturbations just as in general relativity. A system of differential equations describing the evolution of this potential and of the stress-energy density perturbations is obtained. We find that the evolution of scalar perturbations proceeds with a modified effective time-dependent speed of sound, which, contrary to the case of general relativity, does not vanish even at the matter-dominated stage. In a broad range of values of the length parameter controlling the deformation, a specific transition from the regime of modified gravity to the regime of general relativity in the evolution of scalar perturbations takes place during the radiation domination. In this case, the resulting power spectrum of perturbations in radiation and dark matter is suppressed on the comoving spatial scales that enter the Hubble radius before this transition. We estimate the bounds on the deformation parameter for which this suppression does not lead to observable consequences. Evolution of scalar perturbations at the inflationary stage is modified but very slightly and the primordial spectrum generated during inflation is not noticeably different from the one obtained in general relativity.
We investigate the cosmological behavior in a universe governed by time asymmetric extensions of general relativity, which is a novel modified gravity based on the addition of new, time-asymmetric, terms on the Hamiltonian framework, in a way that the algebra of constraints and local physics remain unchanged. Nevertheless, at cosmological scales these new terms can have significant effects that can alter the universe evolution, both at early and late times, and the freedom in the choice of the involved modification function makes the scenario able to produce a huge class of cosmological behaviors. For basic ansatzes of modification, we perform a detailed dynamical analysis, extracting the stable late-time solutions. Amongst others, we find that the universe can result in dark-energy dominated, accelerating solutions, even in the absence of an explicit cosmological constant, in which the dark energy can be quintessence-like, phantom-like, or behave as an effective cosmological constant. Moreover, it can result to matter-domination, or to a Big Rip, or experience the sequence from matter to dark energy domination. Additionally, in the case of closed curvature, the universe may experience a cosmological bounce or turnaround, or even cyclic behavior. Finally, these scenarios can easily satisfy the observational and phenomenological requirements. Hence, time asymmetric cosmology can be a good candidate for the description of the universe.
The recent detections of gravitational waves from binary systems of black holes are in remarkable agreement with the predictions of General Relativity. In this pedagogical mini-review, I will go through the physics of the different phases of the evolution of black hole binary systems, providing a qualitative physical interpretation of each one of them. I will also briefly describe how these phases would be modified if gravitation were described by a theory extending or deforming General Relativity, or if the binary components turned out to be more exotic compact objects than black holes.
We investigate effective equations governing the volume expansion of spatially averaged portions of inhomogeneous cosmologies in spacetimes filled with an arbitrary fluid. This work is a follow-up to previous studies focused on irrotational dust models (Paper I) and irrotational perfect fluids (Paper II) in flow-orthogonal foliations of spacetime. It complements them by considering arbitrary foliations, arbitrary lapse and shift, and by allowing for a tilted fluid flow with vorticity. As for the first studies, the propagation of the spatial averaging domain is chosen to follow the congruence of the fluid, which avoids unphysical dependencies in the averaged system that is obtained. We present two different averaging schemes and corresponding systems of averaged evolution equations providing generalizations of Papers I and II. The first one retains the averaging operator used in several other generalizations found in the literature. We extensively discuss relations to these formalisms and pinpoint limitations, in particular regarding rest mass conservation on the averaging domain. The alternative averaging scheme that we subsequently introduce follows the spirit of Papers I and II and focuses on the fluid flow and the associated 1+3 threading congruence, used jointly with the 3+1 foliation that builds the surfaces of averaging. This results in compact averaged equations with a minimal number of cosmological backreaction terms. We highlight that this system becomes especially transparent when applied to a natural class of foliations which have constant fluid proper time slices.
After a short review of prominent properties of gravitational waves and the newly born gravitational astronomy, we focus on theoretical aspects. Analytic approximation methods in general relativity have played a crucial role in the recent discoveries of gravitational waves. They are used to build theoretical template banks for searching and analyzing the signals in the ground-based detectors LIGO and Virgo, and, further ahead, space-based LISA-like detectors. In particular, the post-Newtonian approximation describes with high accuracy the early inspiral of compact binary systems, made of black holes or neutron stars. It mainly consists of extending the Einstein quadrupole formula by a series of relativistic corrections up to high order. The compact objects are modelled by point masses with spins. The practical calculations face difficult problems of divergences, which have been solved thanks to the dimensional regularization. In the last rotations before the merger, the finite size effects and the internal structure of neutron stars (notably the internal equation of state) affect the evolution of the orbit and the emission of gravitational waves. We describe these effects within a simple Newtonian model.