105 research outputs found
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The instanton liquid and the axion
No full textThe ultimate goal of this thesis is to improve our understanding of the cosmology of axions. Axions couple to QCD
instantons and these non-perturbative effects are modeled within the framework of the interacting instanton liquid model (IILM). The thesis describes the significant advances made within the IILM in order to study the quark-gluon plasma in realistic parameter regimes. In particular, a determination of the temperature-dependent axion mass in the IILM lays the foundation for a critical reevaluation and update of present cosmological axion constraints.
We develop grand canonical Monte Carlo routines to study topological fluctuations in the quark-gluon plasma. The model is calibrated against the topological susceptibility at zero temperature, in the chiral regime of physical quark masses. A numerical framework to derive interactions among the pseudo-particles is developed that is in principle exact, and is used to cure a pathology in the presently available finite temperature interactions.
The IILM reduces field theory to a molecular dynamics description, and we show that, quite generically, the dynamics for non-trivial backgrounds in the presence of light quarks is reminiscent of a strongly associating fluid. To deal with the well-known difficulty in simulating ionic fluids, we develop advanced algorithms based on Biased Monte Carlo techniques.
We study the IILM at finite temperature in the quenched and unquenched sector, with due diligence to a consistent thermodynamic limit. Of particular interest is chiral symmetry breaking and the temperature dependence of the topological susceptibility, and we study in detail the effects of instanton--anti-instanton pairs. Our determination of the topological susceptibility provides, for the first time, a well-motivated axion mass for all temperatures.
The misalignment mechanism for axion production is studied in detail, solving the evolution equations exactly in a radiation dominated FRW universe with the full temperature dependence of the effective degrees of freedom taken into account. Improved constraints in the classic and anthropic axion window are derived. We generalise the latter to large angle fine-tuning by including in the isocurvature contribution to the cosmic microwave background radiation the full anharmonic axion potential effects. Finally, we reexamine bounds from axion string radiation in the thermal scenario to complete a comprehensive update of all cosmological axion constraints
The Topology of Branching Universes
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to survey the possible topologies of branching space-times, and, in particular, to refute the popular notion in the literature that a branching space-time requires a non-Hausdorff topology
Contribution of domain wall networks to the CMB power spectrum
No full textAbstractWe use three domain wall simulations from the radiation era to the late-time dark energy domination era based on the PRS algorithm to calculate the energy–momentum tensor components of domain wall networks in an expanding universe. Unequal time correlators in the radiation, matter and cosmological constant epochs are calculated using the scaling regime of each of the simulations. The CMB power spectrum of a network of domain walls is determined. The first ever quantitative constraint for the domain wall surface tension is obtained using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method; an energy scale of domain walls of 0.93 MeV, which is close but below the Zel'dovich bound, is determined
The volume of a soliton
No full textThere exists, in general, no unique definition of the size (volume, area, etc., depending on dimension) of a soliton. Here we demonstrate that the geometric volume (area etc.) of a soliton is singled out in the sense that it exactly coincides with the thermodynamical or continuum-mechanical volume. In addition, this volume may be defined uniquely for rather arbitrary solitons in arbitrary dimensions
Separable projection integrals for higher-order correlators of the cosmic microwave sky: Acceleration by factors exceeding 100
No full text© 2016. We present a case study describing efforts to optimise and modernise "Modal", the simulation and analysis pipeline used by the Planck satellite experiment for constraining general non-Gaussian models of the early universe via the bispectrum (or three-point correlator) of the cosmic microwave background radiation. We focus on one particular element of the code: the projection of bispectra from the end of inflation to the spherical shell at decoupling, which defines the CMB we observe today. This code involves a three-dimensional inner product between two functions, one of which requires an integral, on a non-rectangular domain containing a sparse grid. We show that by employing separable methods this calculation can be reduced to a one-dimensional summation plus two integrations, reducing the overall dimensionality from four to three. The introduction of separable functions also solves the issue of the non-rectangular sparse grid. This separable method can become unstable in certain scenarios and so the slower non-separable integral must be calculated instead. We present a discussion of the optimisation of both approaches.We demonstrate significant speed-ups of ≈100×, arising from a combination of algorithmic improvements and architecture-aware optimisations targeted at improving thread and vectorisation behaviour. The resulting MPI/OpenMP hybrid code is capable of executing on clusters containing processors and/or coprocessors, with strong-scaling efficiency of 98.6% on up to 16 nodes. We find that a single coprocessor outperforms two processor sockets by a factor of 1.3× and that running the same code across a combination of both microarchitectures improves performance-per-node by a factor of 3.38×. By making bispectrum calculations competitive with those for the power spectrum (or two-point correlator) we are now able to consider joint analysis for cosmological science exploitation of new data
Charge-velocity-dependent one-scale linear model
No full textInternational audienceWe apply a recently developed formalism to study the evolution of a current-carrying string network under the simple but generic assumption of a linear equation of state. We demonstrate that the existence of a scaling solution with nontrivial current depends on the expansion rate of the Universe, the initial root-mean-square current on the string, and the available energy-loss mechanisms. We find that the fast expansion rate after radiation-matter equality will tend to rapidly dilute any preexisting current, and the network will evolve towards the standard Nambu-Goto scaling solution (provided there are no external current-generating mechanisms). During the radiation era, current growth is possible provided the initial conditions for the network generate a relatively large current and/or there is significant early string damping. The network can then achieve scaling with a stable nontrivial current, assuming large currents will be regulated by some leakage mechanism. The potential existence of current-carrying string networks in the radiation era, unlike the standard Nambu-Goto networks expected in the matter era, could have interesting phenomenological consequences
Stretching and Kibble scaling regimes for Hubble-damped defect networks
No full textThe cosmological evolution of topological defect networks can broadly be divided into two stages. At early times they are friction dominated due to particle scattering and therefore nonrelativistic and may either be conformally stretched or evolve in the Kibble regime. At late times they are relativistic and evolve in the well-known linear scaling regime. In this work we show that a sufficiently large Hubble damping (that is a sufficiently fast expansion rate) leads to a linear scaling regime where the network is nonrelativistic. This is therefore another realization of a Kibble scaling regime and also has a conformal stretching regime counterpart which we characterize for the first time. We describe these regimes using analytic arguments in the context of the velocity-dependent one-scale model, and we confirm them using high-resolution 4096[superscript]3 field-theory simulations of domain wall networks. We also use these simulations to improve the calibration of this analytic model for the case of domain walls
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