No Arabic abstract
Theoretical descriptions of observable quantities in cosmological perturbation theory should be independent of coordinate systems. This statement is often referred to as gauge-invariance of observable quantities, and the sanity of their theoretical description is verified by checking its gauge-invariance. We argue that cosmological observables are invariant scalars under diffeomorphisms and as a consequence their theoretical description is gauge-invariant, only at linear order in perturbations. Beyond linear order, they are usually not gauge-invariant, and we provide the general law for the gauge-transformation that the perturbation part of an observable does obey. We apply this finding to derive the second-order expression for the observational light-cone average in cosmology and demonstrate that our expression is indeed invariant under diffeomorphisms.
The remarkable properties of the recently proposed geodesic light-cone (GLC) gauge allow to explicitly solve the geodetic-deviation equation, and thus to derive an exact expression for the Jacobi map J^A_B(s,o) connecting a generic source s to a geodesic observer o in a generic space time. In this gauge J^A_B factorizes into the product of a local quantity at s times one at o, implying similarly factorized expressions for the area and luminosity distance. In any other coordinate system J^A_B is simply given by expressing the GLC quantities in terms of the corresponding ones in the new coordinates. This is explicitly done, at first and second order, respectively, for the synchronous and Poisson gauge-fixing of a perturbed, spatially-flat cosmological background, and the consistency of the two outcomes is checked. Our results slightly amend previous calculations of the luminosity-redshift relation and suggest a possible non-perturbative way for computing the effects of inhomogeneities on observations based on light-like signals.
We study systematically which features in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure (LSS) probe various inhomogeneous properties of the dark sectors (including neutrinos, dark matter, and dark energy). We stress, and quantify by simple formulas, that the primary CMB anisotropies are very susceptible to the gravitational potentials during horizon entry, less at recombination. The CMB thus allows us to scan Phi+Psi and the underlying dark kinetics for all redshifts z~1-10^5. LSS, on the other hand, responds strongest to Phi at low redshifts. Dark perturbations are often parameterized by the anisotropic stress and effective sound speed (stiffness). We find that the dark anisotropic stress and stiffness influence the visible species at the correspondingly early and late stages of horizon entry, and affect stronger respectively the CMB and LSS. The CMB yet remains essential to probing the stiff perturbations of light neutrinos and dark energy, detectable only during horizon entry. The clustering of dark species and large propagation speed of their inhomogeneities also map to distinctive features in the CMB and LSS. -Any parameterization of the signatures of dark kinetics that assumes general relativity can effectively accommodate any modified gravity (MG) that retains the equivalence principle for the visible sectors. This implies that formally the nonstandard structure growth or Phi/Psi ratio, while indicative, are not definitive MG signatures. The definitive signatures of MG may include the strong dependence of the apparent dark dynamics on visible species, its superluminality, and the nonstandard phenomenology of gravitational waves.
Given the important role that the galaxy bispectrum has recently acquired in cosmology and the scale and precision of forthcoming galaxy clustering observations, it is timely to derive the full expression of the large-scale bispectrum going beyond approximated treatments which neglect integrated terms or higher-order bias terms or use the Limber approximation. On cosmological scales, relativistic effects that arise from observing on the past light-cone alter the observed galaxy number counts, therefore leaving their imprints on N-point correlators at all orders. In this paper we compute for the first time the bispectrum including all general relativistic, local and integrated, effects at second order, the tracers bias at second order, geometric effects as well as the primordial non-Gaussianity contribution. This is timely considering that future surveys will probe scales comparable to the horizon where approximations widely used currently may not hold; neglecting these effects may introduce biases in estimation of cosmological parameters as well as primordial non-Gaussianity.
This paper proposes a systematic study of cosmological signatures of modifications of gravity via the presence of a scalar field with a multiplicative coupling to the electromagnetic Lagrangian. We show that, in this framework, variations of the fine structure constant, violations of the distance duality relation, evolution of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and CMB distortions are intimately and unequivocally linked. This enables one to put very stringent constraints on possible violations of the distance duality relation, on the evolution of the CMB temperature and on admissible CMB distortions using current constraints on the fine structure constant. Alternatively, this offers interesting possibilities to test a wide range of theories of gravity by analysing several datasets concurrently. We discuss results obtained using current data as well as some forecasts for future data sets such as those coming from EUCLID or the SKA.
We pursue a program to confront observations with arbitrarily inhomogeneous cosmologies beyond the FLRW metric. The main idea is to test the Copernican principle rather than assuming it a priori. We consider the $Lambda$CDM model endowed with a spherical $Lambda$LTB inhomogeneity around us, that is, we assume isotropy and test the hypothesis of homogeneity. We confront the $Lambda$LTB model with the latest available data from CMB, BAO, type Ia supernovae, local $H_0$, cosmic chronometers, Compton y-distortion and kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect. We find that these data can constrain tightly this extra inhomogeneity, almost to the cosmic variance level: on scales $gtrsim 100$ Mpc structures can have a small non-Copernican effective contrast of just $delta_L sim 0.01$. Furthermore, the constraints on the standard $Lambda$CDM parameters are not weakened after marginalizing over the parameters that model the local structure, to which we assign ignorance priors. In other words, dropping the FLRW metric assumption does not imply worse constraints on the cosmological parameters. This positive result confirms that the present and future data can be meaningfully analyzed within the framework of inhomogeneous cosmology.