Dipolar-Induced Resonance for Ultracold Bosons in a Quasi-1D Optical Lattice

We study the role of the Dipolar-Induced Resonance (DIR) in a quasi-one-dimensional system of ultracold bosons. We first describe the effect of the DIR on two particles in a harmonic trap. Then, we consider a deep optical lattice loaded with ultracold dipolar bosons. In order to describe this system, we introduce a novel atom-dimer extended Bose-Hubbard model, which is the minimal model correctly accounting for the DIR. We analyze the impact of the DIR on the phase diagram at T=0 by exact diagonalization of a small-sized system. We show that the DIR strongly affects this phase diagram. In particular, we predict the mass density wave to occur in a narrow domain corresponding to weak nearest-neighbor interactions, and the occurrence of a collapse phase for stronger dipolar interactions.

The impact of cosmic neutrinos on the gravitational-wave background

We obtain the equation governing the evolution of the cosmological gravitational-wave background, accounting for the presence of cosmic neutrinos, up to second order in perturbation theory. In particular, we focus on the epoch during radiation dominance, after neutrino decoupling, when neutrinos yield a relevant contribution to the total energy density and behave as collisionless ultra-relativistic particles. Besides recovering the standard damping effect due to neutrinos, a new source term for gravitational waves is shown to arise from the neutrino anisotropic stress tensor. The importance of such a source term, so far completely disregarded in the literature, is related to the high velocity dispersion of neutrinos in the considered epoch; its computation requires solving the full second-order Boltzmann equation for collisionless neutrinos.

Possibly Large Corrections to the Inflationary Observables

We point out that the theoretical predictions for the inflationary observables may be generically altered by the presence of fields which are heavier than the Hubble rate during inflation and whose dynamics is usually neglected. They introduce corrections which may be easily larger than both the second-order contributions in the slow-roll parameters and the accuracy expected in the forthcoming experiments.