119279630
CMB E/B decomposition of incomplete sky: a pixel space approach
CMB polarization signal may be decomposed into gradient-like (E) and curl-like (B) mode. We have investigated E/B decomposition in pixel space. We find E/B mixing due to incomplete sky is localized in pixel-space, and negligible in the regions far away from the masked area. By estimating the expected local leakage power, we have diagnosed ambiguous pixels. Our criteria for ambiguous pixels (i.e. rc) is associated with the tensor-to-scalar ratio of B mode pow er spectrum, which the leakage power is comparable to. By setting rc to a lower value, we may reduce leakage level, but reduce sky fraction at the same time. Therefore, we have solved ∂�Cl/∂rc = 0, and obtained the optimal rc, which minimizes the estimation uncertainty, given a foreground mask and noise level. We have applied our method to a simulated map blocked by a foreground (diffuse + point source) mask. Our simulation shows leakage power is smaller than primordial (i.e. unlensed) B mode power spectrum of tensor-to-scalar ratio r ∼ 1× 10 −3 at wide range of multipoles (50. l. 2000), while allowing us to retain sky fraction∼ 0.48.
118997460
Alfv\'en turbulence in the WMAP 5 year data and a forecast for the PLANCK
118530966
How accurately can we measure the hydrogen 2S->1S transition rate from the cosmological data?
Recent progress in observational cosmology, and especially the forthcoming PLANCK mission data, open new directions in so-called precision cosmology. In this paper we illustrate this statement considering the accuracy of cosmological determination of the two-quanta decay rate of 2s hydrogen atom state. We show that the PLANCK data will allow us to measure this decay rate significantly better than in the laboratory experiments.
118455901
CMB data constraint on self-annihilation of dark matter particles
Recently, self‐annihilation of dark matter particles is proposed to explain the “WMAP Haze” and excess of energetic positrons and electrons in ATIC and PAMELA results. If self‐annihilation of dark matter occurs around the recombination of cosmic plasma, energy release from self‐annihilation of dark matter delays the recombination, and hence affects CMB anisotropy. By using the recent CMB data, we have investigated the self‐annihilation of dark matter particles. In this investigation, we do not find statistically significant evidence, and impose an upper bound on 〈σν〉/mϰ.The upcoming data from Planck surveyor and the Fermi Gamma‐ray telescope will allow us to break some of parameter degeneracy and improve constraints on self‐annihilation of dark matter particles.
119245195
CMB map derived from the WMAP data through harmonic internal linear combination
We are presenting an internal linear combination CMB map, in which the foreground is reduced through harmonic variance minimization. We have derived our method by converting a general form of pixel-space approach into spherical harmonic space, maintaining full correspondence. By working in spherical harmonic space, spatial variability of linear weights is incorporated in a self-contained manner and our linear weights are continuous functions of position over the entire sky. The full correspondence to pixel-space approach enables straightforward physical interpretation on our approach. In variance minimization of a linear combination map, the existence of a cross term between residual foregrounds and CMB makes the linear combination of minimum variance differ from that of minimum foreground. We have developed an iterative foreground reduction method, where perturbative correction is made for the cross term. Our CMB map derived from the WMAP data is in better agreement with the WMAP best-fit {lambda}CDM model than the WMAP team's internal linear combination map. We find that our method's capacity to clean foreground is limited by the availability of enough spherical harmonic coefficients of good signal-to-noise ratio.
119074604
Removing the ISW-lensing bias from the local-form primordial non-Gaussianity estimation
The Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect produces a secondary temperature aniso\-tropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as CMB photons travel through time-varying potentials along the line-of-sight. The main contribution comes from redshifts z2, where dark energy leads to a decay of potentials. As the same photons are gravitationally lensed by these decaying potentials, there exists a high degree of correlation between the ISW effect and CMB lensing, leading to a non-zero three-point correlation (bispectrum) of the observed temperature anisotropy. This ISW-lensing bispectrum, whose shape resembles that of the so-called ``local-form'' primordial bispectrum parametrized by fNL, is known to be the largest contamination of fNL. In order to avoid a spurious detection of primordial non-Gaussianity, we need to remove the ISW-lensing bias. In this work, we investigate three debiasing methods: (I) subtraction of an expected, ensemble average of the ISW-lensing bispectrum; (II) subtraction of a measured ISW-lensing bispectrum; and (III) direct subtraction of an estimated ISW signal from an observed temperature map. One may use an estimation of the ISW map from external non-CMB data or that from the CMB data themselves. As the methods II and III are based on fewer assumptions about the nature of dark energy, they are preferred over the method I. While the methods I and II yield unbiased estimates of fNL with comparable error bars, the method III yields a biased result when the underlying primordial fNL is non-zero and the ISW map is estimated from a lensing potential reconstructed from the observed temperature map. One of the sources of the bias is a lensing reconstruction noise bias which is independent of fNL and can be calculated precisely, but other fNL-dependent terms are difficult to compute reliably. We thus conclude that the method II is the best, model-independent way to remove the ISW-lensing bias of fNL, enabling us to test the physics of inflation with smaller systematic errors.
15797229
Self-tuning of the cosmological constant and Einstein Gravity on the brane
We show that a self-tuning mechanism of the cosmological constant could work in 5D non-compact space-time. The standard model matter fields live only on the 4D brane. The change of vacuum energy on the brane just gives rise to dynamical shifts of the profiles of the background metric and a bulk scalar field in the extra dimension, keeping 4D space-time flat. To obtain the Newtonian potential on the brane, we introduce an additional brane-localized 4D Einstein-Hilbert term.
14125969
Inflation with blowing-up solution of cosmological constant problem
The cosmological constant problem is how one chooses, without fine-tuning, one singular point Λeff = 0 for the 4D cosmological constant. We argue that some recently discovered weak self-tuning solutions can be viewed as blowing-up this one point into a band of some parameter. These weak self-tuning solutions may have a virtue that only de Sitter space solutions are allowed outside this band, allowing an inflationary period. We adopt the hybrid inflation at the brane to exit from this inflationary phase and to enter into the standard Big Bang cosmology.
121333200
Charm and fancy changing neutral currents with five quarks
Abstract We propose a five-quark weak interaction model based on the SU(2) × U(1) × U(1)′ gauge group. The fifth quark f with fancy flavor has electric charge 2 3 . The model induces the charm and fancy changing neutral currents in a natural fashion which are responsible for substantial D0 − D 0 mixing to explain the observed wrong-sign dimuon events. However, these flavor changing neutral currents do not couple to leptons, thus forbidding trimuons to appear as the experiments indicate thus far. We discuss in addition how our model can be extended to a vector-like theory.
2256167
Completing natural inflation
If the inflaton is a pseudo-scalar axion, the axion shift symmetry can protect the flatness of its potential from too large radiative corrections. This possibility, known as natural inflation, requires an axion scale which is greater than the (reduced) Planck scale. It is unclear whether such a high value is compatible with an effective field theoretical description, and whether the global axionic symmetry survives quantum gravity effects. We propose a mechanism which provides an effective large axion scale, although the original one is sub-Planckian. The mechanism is based on the presence of two axions, with a potential provided by two anomalous gauge groups. The effective large axion scale is due to an almost exact symmetry between the couplings of the axions to the anomalous groups. We also comment on a possible implementation in heterotic string theory.
121311744
Polarization of recoil-electron beam in high-energy Moller and Bhabha scattering
Longitudinal and transverse polarizations of the final electron beam in Moller and Bhabha scattering are analyzed in electroweak gauge models involving more than one neutral vector boson. In pure QED, for given initial polarizations of incoming particles, the polarization of the outgoing electron beam is the same for Moller and Bhabha scattering and is energy independent. However, in various electroweak gauge models, we find that the energy dependence and final-state polarizations are in general different for the two scattering processes; thus, observing polarization effects in such scattering processes may be useful to test various gauge models at high energy.