Cosmology and Gravitation

Cosmological observations will soon distinguish between the standard slow roll inflationary paradigm and some of its recently developed alternatives. Driven by developments in string theory, many new models include features such as non-minimal kinetic terms, leading to large non-gaussianities, making them observationally testable in the CMB. Models of slow roll inflation can also give rise to large non- gaussianities if the initial inflationary state was sufficiently excited, with a shape dependence that will be clearly distinguishable. I will review these different possibilities and discuss how they provide new theoretical challenges in understanding the initial conditions problem and the global structure of the inflationary universe.

The consequences of a modified gravity (MOG) are explored. I demonstrate how the solutions of the field equations obtained from the action principle of the MOG lead to a theory without any free, adjustable parameters or ad-hoc empirical formulae. The theory successfully explains solar system observations, the dispersion velocities of globular clusters, the rotation curves of galaxies, the mass profiles of X-ray clusters, the dispersion velocities of satellite galaxies, the Bullet Cluster and cosmological observations without exotic dark matter. The peculiar features of the recent data obtained for the merging cluster Abell 520 are discussed. MOG predicts agreement with data from the scale of the solar system to cosmological scales without dark matter. With no undetermined free parameters, the theory can be used to make firm predictions that may be verifiable in the foreseeable future.

I\'ll introduce a particular class of fundamental string configurations in the form of closed loops stabilized by internal dynamics. I\\\'ll describe their classical treatment and embedding in models of string cosmology. I\\\'ll present the quantum version and the semiclassical limit that provides a microscopic description of dipole black rings. I\\\'ll show the parametric matching between the degeneracy of microstates and the entropy of the supergravity solution.

The history of human knowledge is often highlighted by our efforts to explore beyond our apparent horizon. In this talk, I will describe how this challenge has now evolved into our quest to understand the physics at/beyond the cosmological horizon, some twenty orders of magnitude above Columbus’s original goal. I also argue why inflationary paradigm predicts the existence of non-trivial physics beyond the cosmological horizon, and how we can use the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect in the Cosmic Microwave Background to probe this physics, including the nature of gravity and primordial non-gaussianity on the horizon scale.

We consider a consistent construction of the supersymmetric action for a codimension-two brane in six-dimensional Salam-Sezgin supergravity. When the brane carries a tension, we supersymmetrize the brane tension action by introducing a localized Fayet-Iliopoulos term on the brane and modifying the bulk SUSY transformations. As a result, we find that among the axisymmetric vacua of the system, the unwarped background with football-shaped extra dimensions respects N=1 supersymmetry. We extend the analysis to include the brane multiplets with the couplings to the bulk fields.

We have two strong reasons to argue that Einstein\'s theory of general relativity may be incomplete. First, given that it cannot be expressed within a consistent quantum field theory there is reason to expect higher energy corrections. Second, the observation that we are undergoing a current epoch of accelerated expansion might indicate that our understanding of gravity breaks down at the largest scales. A generic result of modified gravity is the creation of a new degree of freedom within the gravitational sector. This new degree of freedom then generically connects local physics to cosmological dynamics. I will present the results of studying two modified theories of gravity emphasizing how they bridge the gap between local and cosmological physics. First I will discuss work I have done on f(R) modified gravity theories, delineating under what conditions these theories deviate strongly from general relativity. Using these results I will talk about some recent work on attempting to detect a characteristic signature of these theories from gravitational lensing. Second I will discuss recent results on ways we may test Chern-Simons gravity (a result of the low energy effective string action) in the Solar System. Chern-Simons gravity has been identified as a candidate for leptogenesis as well as a source for circularly polarized gravitational-waves from inflation. As I will discuss, constraints to Chern-Simons gravity may improve in the near future with further observations of double pulsar systems.

I will discuss a new method of inflaton potential reconstruction that combines the flow formalism, which is a stochastic method of inflationary model generation, with an exact numerical calculation of the mode equations of quantum fluctuations. This technique allows one to explore regions of the inflationary parameter space yielding spectra that are not well parameterized as power-laws. We use this method to generate an ensemble of generalized spectral shapes that provide equally good fits to current CMB and LSS as data as do simpler power-law spectra. Within this ensemble are spectra that exhibit a strong running on large angular scales (where cosmic variance is large) that turns off on small scales. Such strongly running spectra are accompanied by large tensor components that lie outside the 1 and 2 sigma limits of current WMAP3 and SDSS data. This demonstrates that the generalization of the spectral shape adversely impacts our ability to constrain key inflationary observables. The inflationary models giving rise to such spectra are characterized by an initially fast rolling inflaton, in marked contrast to the dominant paradigm of slow roll inflation.

The detection of primordial non-Gaussianity could provide a powerful means to rule out various inflationary scenarios. Although scale-invariant non-Gaussianity is currently best constrained by the Cosmic Microwave Background, single-field inflation models with changing sound speed can have strongly scale dependent non-Gaussianity. I will discuss the theoretical motivation for such models and present work on the likely ability of current and future large scale structure measurements to constrain them.

f(R) theories are an alternative approach at the phenomenon of cosmic acceleration, in which the Einstein-Hilbert action for gravity is modified by adding a function of the Ricci scalar, f(R). While at the background level viable f(R) models must closely mimic LCDM, the difference in their prediction for the growth of large scale structures can be sufficiently large to leave detectable signatures in future surveys. In this talk, after reviewing the conditions for the background viability of f(R) theories, I will focus on scalar perturbations. I will present in some details the dynamics of linear perturbations, showing what are the characteristic imprints of f(R) models in the growth of structures and consider possible observational tests