No Arabic abstract
We study how inhomogeneities of the cosmological fluid fields backreact on the homogeneous part of energy density and how they modify the Friedmann equations. In general, backreaction requires to go beyond the pressureless ideal fluid approximation, and this can lead to a reduced growth of cosmological large scale structure. Since observational evidence favours evolution close to the standard growing mode in the linear regime, we focus on two-component fluids in which the non-ideal fluid is gravitationally coupled to cold dark matter and in which a standard growing mode persists. This is realized, e.g. for a baryonic fluid coupled to cold dark matter. We calculate the backreaction for this case and for a wide range of other two-fluid models. Here the effect is either suppressed because the non-ideal matter properties are numerically too small, or because they lead to a too stringent UV cut-off of the integral over the power spectrum that determines backreaction. We discuss then matter field backreaction from a broader perspective and generalize the formalism such that also far-from-equilibrium scenarios relevant to late cosmological times and non-linear scales can be addressed in the future.
We develop a field-theoretic description of large-scale structure formation by taking the non-relativistic limit of a canonically transformed, real scalar field which is minimally coupled to scalar gravitational perturbations in longitudinal gauge. We integrate out the gravitational constraint fields and arrive at a non-local action which is only specified in terms of the dynamical degrees of freedom. In order to make this framework closer to the classical particle description, we construct the corresponding 2PI effective action truncated at two loop order for a non-squeezed state without field expectation values. We contrast the dynamical description of the coincident time phase-space density to the standard Vlasov description of cold dark matter particles and identify momentum and time scales at which linear perturbation theory will deviate from the standard evolution.
We introduce a generalization of the 4-dimensional averaging window function of Gasperini, Marozzi and Veneziano (2010) that may prove useful for a number of applications. The covariant nature of spatial scalar averaging schemes to address the averaging problem in relativistic cosmology is an important property that is implied by construction, but usually remains implicit. We employ here the approach of Gasperini et al. for two reasons. First, the formalism and its generalization presented here are manifestly covariant. Second, the formalism is convenient for disentangling the dependencies on foliation, volume measure, and boundaries in the averaged expressions entering in scalar averaging schemes. These properties will prove handy for simplifying expressions, but also for investigating extremal foliations and for comparing averaged properties of different foliations directly. The proposed generalization of the window function allows for choosing the most appropriate averaging scheme for the physical problem at hand, and for distinguishing between the role of the foliation itself and the role of the volume measure in averaged dynamic equations. We also show that one particular window function obtained from this generalized class results in an averaging scheme corresponding to that of a recent investigation by Buchert, Mourier and Roy (2018) and, as a byproduct, we explicitly show that the general equations for backreaction derived therein are covariant.
In this work, we analyze the implications of graviton to photon conversion in the presence of large scale magnetic fields. We consider the magnetic fields associated with galaxy clusters, filaments in the large scale structure, as well as primordial magnetic fields. {We analyze the interaction of these magnetic fields with an exogenous high-frequency gravitational wave (HFGW) background which may exist in the Universe. We show that, in the presence of the magnetic fields, a sufficiently strong HFGW background would lead to an observable signature in the frequency spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).} The sensitivity of current day CMB experiments allows to place significant constraints on the strength of HFGW background, $Omega_{GW}lesssim1$. These limits are about 25 orders of magnitude stronger {than currently existing direct constraints} in this frequency region.
Effects from nonstandard corrections to Newtonian gravity, at large scale, can be investigated using the cosmological structure formation. In particular, it is possible to show if and how a logarithmic correction (as that induced from nonlocal gravity) modifies the clustering properties of galaxies and of clusters of galaxies. The thermodynamics of such systems can be used to obtain important information about the effects of such modification on clustering. We will compare its effects with observational data and it will be demonstrated that the observations seem to point to a characteristic scale where such a logarithmic correction might be in play at galactic scales. However, at larger scales such statistical inferences are much weaker, so that a fully reliable statistical evidence for this kind of corrections cannot be stated without further investigations and the use of more varied and precise cosmological and astrophysical probes.
We develop a non-perturbative formalism for scalar metric fluctuations from a 5D extended version of general relativity in vacuum. In this work we concentrate our efforts on calculations valid on large cosmological scales, which are the dominant during the inflationary phase of the universe. The resulting metric in this limit is obtained after implementing a planar coordinate transformation on a 5D Ricci-flat metric solution. We calculate the spectrum of these fluctuations with an effective 4D Schwarzschild-de Sitter spacetime on cosmological scales, which is obtained after we make a static foliation on the non-compact extra coordinate. Our results show how the squared metric fluctuations of the primordial universe become scale invariant with the inflationary expansion.