Cosmology and Gravitation

We are now firmly within the ALMA-inspired era of star formation studies. We have abundant high sensitivity and resolution observations of star-disk-outflow systems as well as the ability to perform complex high-resolution plasma astrophysics simulations of their formation. I review recent three-dimensional nonideal MHD simulations that reveal surprising new insights into the role of magnetic fields and magnetic field dissipation in creating outflows, arcs, and cavities on scales of hundreds to thousands of au. Magnetic fields are responsible for a complex inflow-outflow structure around a protostar. I end the talk with results that may answer the longstanding big question in star formation studies: what stops the mass infall on to a protostar?

The cosmic neutrino background is like the cosmic microwave background, but less photon-y and more neutrino-ey. The CNB is also less talked about than the CMB, mostly because it's nearly impossible to detect directly. But if it could be detected, it would be interesting in several ways that are discussed.

Quasi-Einstein equations are generalizations of the Einstein equation. They arise from warped product Einstein metrics (Kaluza-Klein reductions), Ricci solitons, cosmology, near-horizon geometries, and smooth measured Lorentzian length spaces. Despite their apparent generality, they often have a surprising rigidity. I will review some recent developments in the area, focusing on near-horizon geometries, including Dunajski and Lucietti's near-horizon version of the Hawking rigidity theorem. I will discuss an application to 5-dimensional extreme (Myers-Perry type) black holes whose horizons admit the structure of the group SU(2).

The 21-cm line from neutral hydrogen holds immense potential as a probe of early astrophysics and cosmic evolution. Realizing the potential of this observational probe, however, is limited by our ability to control systematic effects in the data and model the cosmological 21-cm signal. In this talk, I will provide an overview of the observational prospects made possible through the cosmic 21-cm signal and discuss the challenges confronting interferometric experiments that are targeting a high-redshift detection. I will focus on recent developments from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA), covering our latest upper limits on the 21-cm power spectrum and their implications for early X-ray heating of the intergalactic medium. I will additionally discuss our latest efforts to understand and mitigate mutual coupling, a complex systematic effect in the data that threatens to thwart our efforts to detect the cosmological 21-cm signal. I will conclude by discussing the path forward with HERA, with a preliminary view of what to expect from forthcoming analyses.

Gravitational forces from the largest structures in the Universe leave a detectable imprint on galaxies and their local environment. I will present a new approach to tracing the tidal field using these correlations: the intrinsic alignment of small groups of galaxies, or "multipelts". Multiplets mostly consist of 2-4 galaxies within 1 Mpc/h of each other, and we measure their orientations relative to the galaxy-traced tidal field. Using spectroscopic redshfits from the DESI Y1 survey, we detect intrinsic alignment out to projected separations of 100 Mpc/h and beyond redshift 1. We find a simillar signal regardless of galaxy luminosity or color, which could make multiplet alignment a useful tool for mapping the direction of the tidal field and any cosmological effects which impact it. Our detection demonstrates that galaxy clustering in the non-linear regime of structure formation preserves an interpretable memory of the large-scale tidal field. 

In this talk I will discuss the potential of future high-resolution CMB observations to probe structure on sub-galactic scales. In particular, I will discuss how a CMB-HD experiment can measure lensing over the range 0.005 h/Mpc < k < 55 h/Mpc, spanning four orders of magnitude, with a total lensing signal-to-noise ratio from the temperature, polarization, and lensing power spectra greater than 1900. These lensing measurements would allow CMB-HD to distinguish between cold dark matter (CDM) and non-CDM models that can resolve apparent small-scale tensions with CDM. In addition, CMB-HD can distinguish between baryonic feedback effects and non-CDM models due to the different way each impacts the lensing signal. The kinetic Sunyaev-Zel’dovich power spectrum measured by CMB-HD further constrains non-CDM models that deviate from CDM. In sum, future CMB experiments will not only measure traditional cosmological parameters with unprecedented precision, but will also simultaneously constrain baryonic physics and dark matter properties that impact sub-galactic scales.

The Effective Field Theory of Large Scale Structure (EFTofLSS) has found tremendous success as a perturbative framework for the evolution of large scale structure, and it is now routinely used to compare theoretical predictions against cosmological observations. The model for the total matter field includes one nuisance parameter at 1-loop order, the effective sound speed, which can be extracted by matching the EFT to full N-body simulations. In this talk we explore two different directions related to the effective sound speed. We first show that its emergence can be understood even without effective field theory ingredients, through a perturbative framework that solves the Vlasov-Poisson system of equations directly in phase space. However, we will argue that the EFT is necessary to ensure self-consistency. We then discuss how one can estimate the effective sound speed, via separate universe techniques, with analytic calculations. The estimate is in good agreement with simulation results, and we show it can be used to extract the cosmology dependence of the effective sound speed and to shed light on what cosmic structures shape its value.