We investigate a model that modifies general relativity on cosmological scales, specifically by having a `glitch' in the gravitational constant between the cosmological (super-horizon) and Newtonian (sub-horizon) regimes, as motivated e.g. in the Hořava-Lifshitz proposal or in the Einstein-aether framework. This gives a single-parameter extension to the standard ΛCDM model, which is equivalent to adding a dark energy component, but where the energy density of this component can have either sign. Fitting to data from the Planck satellite, we find that negative contributions are, in fact, preferred. Additionally, we find that roughly one percent weaker superhorizon gravity can somewhat ease the Hubble and clustering tensions in a range of cosmological observations, although at the expense of spoiling fits to the baryonic acoustic oscillation scale in galaxy surveys. Therefore, the extra parametric freedom offered by our model deserves further exploration, and we discuss how future observations may elucidate this potential cosmic glitch in gravity, through a four-fold reduction in statistical uncertainties.
The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) was founded in 1978 and was the first institution in Italy to promote post-graduate courses leading to a Doctor Philosophiae (or PhD) degree. A centre of excellence among Italian and international universities, the school has around 65 teachers, 100 post docs and 245 PhD students, and is located in Trieste, in a campus of more than 10 hectares with wonderful views over the Gulf of Trieste.
SISSA hosts a very high-ranking, large and multidisciplinary scientific research output. The scientific papers produced by its researchers are published in high impact factor, well-known international journals, and in many cases in the world's most prestigious scientific journals such as Nature and Science. Over 900 students have so far started their careers in the field of mathematics, physics and neuroscience research at SISSA.
ISSN: 1475-7516
Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) covers all aspects of cosmology and particle astrophysics and encompasses theoretical, observational and experimental areas as well as computation and simulation. An electronic-only journal, JCAP is jointly owned by IOP Publishing and SISSA.
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Marco Cirelli et al JCAP03(2011)051
We provide ingredients and recipes for computing signals of TeV-scale Dark Matter annihilations and decays in the Galaxy and beyond. For each DM channel, we present the energy spectra of at production, computed by high-statistics simulations. We estimate the Monte Carlo uncertainty by comparing the results yielded by the Pythia and Herwig event generators. We then provide the propagation functions for charged particles in the Galaxy, for several DM distribution profiles and sets of propagation parameters. Propagation of e± is performed with an improved semi-analytic method that takes into account position-dependent energy losses in the Milky Way. Using such propagation functions, we compute the energy spectra of e±, and at the location of the Earth. We then present the gamma ray fluxes, both from prompt emission and from Inverse Compton scattering in the galactic halo. Finally, we provide the spectra of extragalactic gamma rays. All results areavailable in numerical form and ready to be consumed.
Nicole F. Bell et al JCAP04(2024)006
The capture of dark matter, and its subsequent annihilation, can heat old, isolated neutron stars. In order for kinetic heating to be achieved, the captured dark matter must undergo sufficient scattering to deposit its kinetic energy in the star. We find that this energy deposit typically occurs quickly, for most of the relevant parameter space. In order for appreciable annihilation heating to also be achieved, the dark matter must reach a state of capture-annihilation equilibrium in the star. We show that this can be fulfilled for all types of dark matter-baryon interactions. This includes cases where the scattering or annihilation cross sections are momentum or velocity suppressed in the non-relativistic limit. Importantly, we find that capture-annihilation equilibrium, and hence maximal annihilation heating, can be achieved without complete thermalization of the captured dark matter. For scattering cross sections that saturate the capture rate, we find that capture-annihilation equilibrium is typically reached on a timescale of less than 1 year for vector interactions and 104 years for scalar interactions.
J. Ambjørn and Y. Watabiki JCAP12(2023)011
We show that by allowing our Universe to merge with other universes one is lead to modified Friedmann equations that explain the present accelerated expansion of our Universe without the need of a cosmological constant.
Peter Ade et al JCAP02(2019)056
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a new cosmic microwave background experiment being built on Cerro Toco in Chile, due to begin observations in the early 2020s. We describe the scientific goals of the experiment, motivate the design, and forecast its performance. SO will measure the temperature and polarization anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background in six frequency bands centered at: 27, 39, 93, 145, 225 and 280 GHz. The initial configuration of SO will have three small-aperture 0.5-m telescopes and one large-aperture 6-m telescope, with a total of 60,000 cryogenic bolometers. Our key science goals are to characterize the primordial perturbations, measure the number of relativistic species and the mass of neutrinos, test for deviations from a cosmological constant, improve our understanding of galaxy evolution, and constrain the duration of reionization. The small aperture telescopes will target the largest angular scales observable from Chile, mapping ≈ 10% of the sky to a white noise level of 2 μK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, to measure the primordial tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, at a target level of σ(r)=0.003. The large aperture telescope will map ≈ 40% of the sky at arcminute angular resolution to an expected white noise level of 6 μK-arcmin in combined 93 and 145 GHz bands, overlapping with the majority of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope sky region and partially with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. With up to an order of magnitude lower polarization noise than maps from the Planck satellite, the high-resolution sky maps will constrain cosmological parameters derived from the damping tail, gravitational lensing of the microwave background, the primordial bispectrum, and the thermal and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effects, and will aid in delensing the large-angle polarization signal to measure the tensor-to-scalar ratio. The survey will also provide a legacy catalog of 16,000 galaxy clusters and more than 20,000 extragalactic sources.
Wendy L. Freedman and Barry F. Madore JCAP11(2023)050
One of the most exciting and pressing issues in cosmology today is the discrepancy between some measurements of the local Hubble constant and other values of the expansion rate inferred from the observed temperature and polarization fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Resolving these differences holds the potential for the discovery of new physics beyond the standard model of cosmology: Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), a successful model that has been in place for more than 20 years. Given both the fundamental significance of this outstanding discrepancy, and the many-decades-long effort to increase the accuracy of the extragalactic distance scale, it is critical to demonstrate that the local measurements are convincingly free from residual systematic errors. We review the progress over the past quarter century in measurements of the local value of the Hubble constant, and discuss remaining challenges. Particularly exciting are new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), for which we present an overview of our program and first results. We focus in particular on Cepheids and the Tip of the Red Giant Branch (TRGB) stars, as well as a relatively new method, the JAGB (J-Region Asymptotic Giant Branch) method, all methods that currently exhibit the demonstrably smallest statistical and systematic uncertainties. JWST is delivering high-resolution near-infrared imaging data to both test for and to address directly several of the systematic uncertainties that have historically limited the accuracy of extragalactic distance scale measurements (e.g., the dimming effects of interstellar dust, chemical composition differences in the atmospheres of stars, and the crowding and blending of Cepheids contaminated by nearby previously unresolved stars). For the first galaxy in our program, NGC 7250, the high-resolution JWST images demonstrate that many of the Cepheids observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are significantly crowded by nearby neighbors. Avoiding the more significantly crowded variables, the scatter in the JWST near-infrared (NIR) Cepheid PL relation is decreased by a factor of two compared to those from HST, illustrating the power of JWST for improvements to local measurements of H0. Ultimately, these data will either confirm the standard model, or provide robust evidence for the inclusion of additional new physics.
Marica Branchesi et al JCAP07(2023)068
The Einstein Telescope (ET), the European project for a third-generation gravitational-wave detector, has a reference configuration based on a triangular shape consisting of three nested detectors with 10 km arms, where each detector has a 'xylophone' configuration made of an interferometer tuned toward high frequencies, and an interferometer tuned toward low frequencies and working at cryogenic temperature. Here, we examine the scientific perspectives under possible variations of this reference design. We perform a detailed evaluation of the science case for a single triangular geometry observatory, and we compare it with the results obtained for a network of two L-shaped detectors (either parallel or misaligned) located in Europe, considering different choices of arm-length for both the triangle and the 2L geometries. We also study how the science output changes in the absence of the low-frequency instrument, both for the triangle and the 2L configurations. We examine a broad class of simple 'metrics' that quantify the science output, related to compact binary coalescences, multi-messenger astronomy and stochastic backgrounds, and we then examine the impact of different detector designs on a more specific set of scientific objectives.
Simone Aiola et al JCAP12(2020)047
We present new arcminute-resolution maps of the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropy from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, using data taken from 2013–2016 at 98 and 150 GHz. The maps cover more than 17,000 deg2, the deepest 600 deg2 with noise levels below 10μK-arcmin. We use the power spectrum derived from almost 6,000 deg2 of these maps to constrain cosmology. The ACT data enable a measurement of the angular scale of features in both the divergence-like polarization and the temperature anisotropy, tracing both the velocity and density at last-scattering. From these one can derive the distance to the last-scattering surface and thus infer the local expansion rate, H0. By combining ACT data with large-scale information from WMAP we measure H0=67.6± 1.1 km/s/Mpc, at 68% confidence, in excellent agreement with the independently-measured Planck satellite estimate (from ACT alone we find H0=67.9± 1.5 km/s/Mpc). The ΛCDM model provides a good fit to the ACT data, and we find no evidence for deviations: both the spatial curvature, and the departure from the standard lensing signal in the spectrum, are zero to within 1σ; the number of relativistic species, the primordial Helium fraction, and the running of the spectral index are consistent with ΛCDM predictions to within 1.5–2.2σ. We compare ACT, WMAP, and Planck at the parameter level and find good consistency; we investigate how the constraints on the correlated spectral index and baryon density parameters readjust when adding CMB large-scale information that ACT does not measure. The DR4 products presented here will be publicly released on the NASA Legacy Archive for Microwave Background Data Analysis.
A. Abdul Halim et al JCAP01(2024)022
The combined fit of the measured energy spectrum and shower maximum depth distributions of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays is known to constrain the parameters of astrophysical models with homogeneous source distributions. Studies of the distribution of the cosmic-ray arrival directions show a better agreement with models in which a fraction of the flux is non-isotropic and associated with the nearby radio galaxy Centaurus A or with catalogs such as that of starburst galaxies. Here, we present a novel combination of both analyses by a simultaneous fit of arrival directions, energy spectrum, and composition data measured at the Pierre Auger Observatory. The model takes into account a rigidity-dependent magnetic field blurring and an energy-dependent evolution of the catalog contribution shaped by interactions during propagation. We find that a model containing a flux contribution from the starburst galaxy catalog of around 20% at 40 EeV with a magnetic field blurring of around 20° for a rigidity of 10 EV provides a fair simultaneous description of all three observables. The starburst galaxy model is favored with a significance of 4.5σ (considering experimental systematic effects) compared to a reference model with only homogeneously distributed background sources. By investigating a scenario with Centaurus A as a single source in combination with the homogeneous background, we confirm that this region of the sky provides the dominant contribution to the observed anisotropy signal. Models containing a catalog of jetted active galactic nuclei whose flux scales with the γ-ray emission are, however, disfavored as they cannot adequately describe the measured arrival directions.
P.S. Bhupal Dev et al JCAP04(2024)045
We study the full-sky distribution of the radio emission from the stimulated decay of axions which are assumed to compose the dark matter in the Galaxy. Besides the constant extragalactic and CMB components, the decays are stimulated by a Galactic radio emission with a spatial distribution that we empirically determine from observations. We compare the diffuse emission to the counterimages of the brightest supernovæ remnants, and take into account the effects of free-free absorption. We show that, if the dark matter halo is described by a cuspy NFW profile, the expected signal from the Galactic center is the strongest. Interestingly, the emission from the Galactic anti-center provides competitive constraints that do not depend on assumptions on the uncertain dark matter density in the inner region. Furthermore, the anti-center of the Galaxy is the brightest spot if the Galactic dark matter density follows a cored profile. The expected signal from stimulated decays of axions of mass ma ∼ 10-6 eV is within reach of the Square Kilometer Array for an axion-photon coupling gaγ ≳ (2-3) × 10-11 GeV-1.
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Muhammad Ali Raza et al JCAP05(2024)047
The visible universe is filled with different types of plasma media in the form of stars, nebulas and other forms of excited gases. These matter fields have a high influence on the gravity and are likely to be present around the black holes due to the immense gravitational attraction. Since a plasma medium affects the speed of light, therefore we investigated the null geodesics and various optical features around the rotating black hole in Kalb-Ramond gravity immersed in plasma medium. Various plasma distributions are considered to develop a comparative study for their influence on unstable null circular orbits, shadows and evaporation rate of the black hole in the presence of a plasma medium. Moreover, the shadow results are also compared with Event Horizon Telescope data for M78* and Sgr A* in order to estimate the parametric bounds for which the rotating black hole in Kalb-Ramond gravity is considered either M87* or Sgr A* under the different values of plasma parameters. From this analysis, we also found the distribution of plasma that has a significant impact on the above mentioned features and is most likely to be present around M87* and Sgr A*.
Xiang-Qian Li et al JCAP05(2024)048
In this study, we focus on a black hole immersed in a cosmological Chaplygin-like dark fluid (CDF), characterized by the equation of state p = -B/ρ and an additional parameter q influencing the energy density of the fluid. We investigate the geodesic structure, shadow, and optical appearance of such a black hole. Through analysis on the effective potential and the epicyclic frequencies, it is found that the existence of innermost/outermost stable circular orbits for a timelike particle is governed by the CDF parameters. The behaviors of the orbital conserved quantities and Keplerian frequency are also examined. Due to the existence of pseudo-cosmological horizon, the determination of the shadow radius depends significantly on the position of the observer. By placing the static observer at an approximately flat position between the event and pseudo-cosmological horizons, we constrain the CDF parameters using EHT observations. We investigate the effect of CDF on the shadows and optical images of the black hole, surrounded by various profiles of accretions. For the thin disk accretion, the light trajectories are categorized into direct emission, lensing ring, and photon ring based on impact parameters. Due to the existence of outermost stable circular orbits, outer edges could exist in the direct and lensing ring images. The observed brightness is mainly due to direct emission, with a minor contribution from the lensing ring, while the contribution from the photon ring is negligible due to extreme demagnetization. In the case of spherical accretion, we consider both static and infalling accretion models. The images obtained under infalling accretion are slightly darker than those under static accretion, attributed to the Doppler effect. Throughout the study, we analyze the influence of the parameters B and q on the results.
Beatrice Moser et al JCAP05(2024)049
Accurate redshift calibration is required to obtain unbiased cosmological information from large-scale galaxy surveys. In a forward modelling approach, the redshift distribution n(z) of a galaxy sample is measured using a parametric galaxy population model constrained by observations. We use a model that captures the redshift evolution of the galaxy luminosity functions, colours, and morphology, for red and blue samples. We constrain this model via simulation-based inference, using factorized Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) at the image level. We apply this framework to HSC deep field images, complemented with photometric redshifts from COSMOS2020. The simulated telescope images include realistic observational and instrumental effects. By applying the same processing and selection to real data and simulations, we obtain a sample of n(z) distributions from the ABC posterior. The photometric properties of the simulated galaxies are in good agreement with those from the real data, including magnitude, colour and redshift joint distributions. We compare the posterior n(z) from our simulations to the COSMOS2020 redshift distributions obtained via template fitting photometric data spanning the wavelength range from UV to IR. We mitigate sample variance in COSMOS by applying a reweighting technique. We thus obtain a good agreement between the simulated and observed redshift distributions, with a difference in the mean at the 1σ level up to a magnitude of 24 in the i band. We discuss how our forward model can be applied to current and future surveys and be further extended. The ABC posterior and further material will be made publicly available at https://cosmology.ethz.ch/research/software-lab/ufig.html.
Isaac R. Wang and Xun-Jie Xu JCAP05(2024)050
Neutrinos are often considered as a portal to new physics beyond the Standard Model (SM) and might possess phenomenologically interesting interactions with dark matter (DM). This paper examines the cosmological imprints of DM that interacts with and is produced from SM neutrinos at temperatures below the MeV scale. We take a model-independent approach to compute the evolution of DM in this framework and present analytic results which agree well with numerical ones. Both freeze-in and freeze-out regimes are included in our analysis. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the thermal evolution of neutrinos might be substantially affected by their interaction with DM. We highlight two distinctive imprints of such DM on neutrinos: (i) a large, negative contribution to Neff, which is close to the current experimental limits and will readily be probed by future experiments; (ii) spectral distortion of the cosmic neutrino background (CνB) due to DM annihilating into neutrinos, a potentially important effect for the ongoing experimental efforts to detect CνB.
Yutong He et al JCAP05(2024)051
We apply the inverse Gertsenshtein effect, i.e., the graviton-photon conversion in the presence of a magnetic field, to constrain high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs). Using existing astrophysical measurements, we compute upper limits on the GW energy densities ΩGW at 16 different frequency bands. Given the observed magnetisation of galaxy clusters with field strength B ∼ μG correlated on (10) kpc scales, we estimate HFGW constraints in the (102) GHz regime to be ΩGW ≲ 1016 with the temperature measurements of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). Similarly, we conservatively obtain ΩGW ≲ 1013 (1011) in the (102) MHz ((10) GHz) regime by assuming uniform magnetic field with strength B ∼ 0.1 nG and saturating the excess signal over the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) reported by radio telescopes such as the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR Signature (EDGES), LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), and the balloon-borne second generation Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE2) with graviton-induced photons. The upcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) can tighten these constraints by roughly 10 orders of magnitude, which will be a step closer to reaching the critical value of ΩGW = 1 or the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) bound of ΩGW ≃ 1.2 × 10-6. We point to future improvement of the SKA forecast and estimate that proposed CMB measurement at the level of (100-2) nK, such as Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) and Voyage 2050, are needed to viably detect stochastic backgrounds of HFGWs.
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Beatrice Moser et al JCAP05(2024)049
Accurate redshift calibration is required to obtain unbiased cosmological information from large-scale galaxy surveys. In a forward modelling approach, the redshift distribution n(z) of a galaxy sample is measured using a parametric galaxy population model constrained by observations. We use a model that captures the redshift evolution of the galaxy luminosity functions, colours, and morphology, for red and blue samples. We constrain this model via simulation-based inference, using factorized Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) at the image level. We apply this framework to HSC deep field images, complemented with photometric redshifts from COSMOS2020. The simulated telescope images include realistic observational and instrumental effects. By applying the same processing and selection to real data and simulations, we obtain a sample of n(z) distributions from the ABC posterior. The photometric properties of the simulated galaxies are in good agreement with those from the real data, including magnitude, colour and redshift joint distributions. We compare the posterior n(z) from our simulations to the COSMOS2020 redshift distributions obtained via template fitting photometric data spanning the wavelength range from UV to IR. We mitigate sample variance in COSMOS by applying a reweighting technique. We thus obtain a good agreement between the simulated and observed redshift distributions, with a difference in the mean at the 1σ level up to a magnitude of 24 in the i band. We discuss how our forward model can be applied to current and future surveys and be further extended. The ABC posterior and further material will be made publicly available at https://cosmology.ethz.ch/research/software-lab/ufig.html.
Yutong He et al JCAP05(2024)051
We apply the inverse Gertsenshtein effect, i.e., the graviton-photon conversion in the presence of a magnetic field, to constrain high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs). Using existing astrophysical measurements, we compute upper limits on the GW energy densities ΩGW at 16 different frequency bands. Given the observed magnetisation of galaxy clusters with field strength B ∼ μG correlated on (10) kpc scales, we estimate HFGW constraints in the (102) GHz regime to be ΩGW ≲ 1016 with the temperature measurements of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT). Similarly, we conservatively obtain ΩGW ≲ 1013 (1011) in the (102) MHz ((10) GHz) regime by assuming uniform magnetic field with strength B ∼ 0.1 nG and saturating the excess signal over the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) reported by radio telescopes such as the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR Signature (EDGES), LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR), and Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), and the balloon-borne second generation Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission (ARCADE2) with graviton-induced photons. The upcoming Square Kilometer Array (SKA) can tighten these constraints by roughly 10 orders of magnitude, which will be a step closer to reaching the critical value of ΩGW = 1 or the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) bound of ΩGW ≃ 1.2 × 10-6. We point to future improvement of the SKA forecast and estimate that proposed CMB measurement at the level of (100-2) nK, such as Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) and Voyage 2050, are needed to viably detect stochastic backgrounds of HFGWs.
Joseph H.P. Jackson et al JCAP05(2024)053
The separate-universe approach gives an intuitive way to understand the evolution of cosmological perturbations in the long-wavelength limit. It uses solutions of the spatially-homogeneous equations of motion to model the evolution of the inhomogeneous universe on large scales. We show that the separate-universe approach fails on a finite range of super-Hubble scales at a sudden transition from slow roll to ultra-slow roll during inflation in the very early universe. Such transitions are a feature of inflation models giving a large enhancement in the primordial power spectrum on small scales, necessary to produce primordial black holes after inflation. We show that the separate-universe approach still works in a piece-wise fashion, before and after the transition, but spatial gradients on finite scales require a discontinuity in the homogeneous solution at the transition. We discuss the implications for the δN formalism and stochastic inflation, which employ the separate-universe approximation.
Ivo Sengo et al JCAP05(2024)054
We analyse the lensing images by dynamically robust rotating (mini-)Proca stars surrounded by thin accretion disks. Due to their peculiar geodesic structure we show that these images exhibit striking similarities with the ones of BHs, for appropriately chosen disk intensity profile, when imposing a GRMHD-motivated emission cut off. Additionally, and unlike the non-rotating case, these similarities prevail even when considering equatorial observations. This example illustrates how a horizonless compact object without light rings, with a plausible formation mechanism and dynamically robust, could mimic detailed features of black hole imagiology.
Edward Wang JCAP05(2024)056
We analyze the impact of resonant conversions mediated by non-vanishing magnetic moments between active neutrinos and a heavy sterile neutrino on the supernova neutrino flux. We present the level-crossing scheme for such a scenario and derive the neutrino fluxes after conversion, paying particular attention to the order in which the resonances occur. We then compute the expected event rates from the neutronization burst of a future supernova at DUNE and Hyper-Kamiokande to derive new constraints on the neutrino magnetic moment. With this, we find a sensitivity down to a few 10-15 μB for a sterile neutrino in the O(eV) mass range.
Elisa Todarello et al JCAP05(2024)040
If the dark matter in the Universe is made of μeV axion-like particles (ALPs), then a rich phenomenology can emerge in connection to their stimulated decay into two photons. We discuss the ALP stimulated decay induced by electromagnetic radiation from Galactic radio sources. Three signatures, made by two echoes and one collinear emission, are associated with the decay, and can be simultaneously detected, offering a unique opportunity for a clear ALP identification. We derive the formalism associated with such signatures starting from first principles, and providing the relevant equations to be applied to study the ALP phenomenology. We then focus on the case of Galactic pulsars as stimulating sources and derive forecasts for future observations, which will be complementary to helioscopes and haloscopes results.
C. Deffayet and R.P. Woodard JCAP05(2024)042
We consider the classic question posed by Pardo and Spergel about the price of abandoning dark matter in the context of an invariant, metric-based theory of gravity. Our answer is that the price is nonlocality. This has been known for some time in the context of the quasi-static regime. We show that it also applies for cosmology and we exhibit a model which reproduces standard CDM successes such as perturbations in the cosmic microwave background, baryon acoustic oscillations and structure formation.
Elisa Todarello et al JCAP05(2024)043
Nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies are ideal targets in the search for indirect dark matter (DM) signals. In this work, we analyze MUSE spectroscopic observations of a sample of five galaxies, composed of both classical and ultra-faint dwarf spheroidals. The goal is to search for radiative decays of axion-like particles (ALPs) in the mass range of 2.7–5.3 eV. After taking into account the uncertainties associated with the DM spatial distribution in the galaxies, we derive robust bounds on the effective ALP-two-photon coupling. They lie well below the QCD axion band and are significantly more constraining than limits from other probes, in the relevant mass range. We also test the possible presence of a positive signal, concluding that none of the wavelength channels selected for this analysis, i.e., not affected by large background contamination, is exhibiting such evidence.
Trupti Patil et al JCAP05(2024)033
We do a detailed analysis of a well-theoretically motivated interacting dark energy scalar field model with a time-varying interaction term. Using current cosmological datasets from CMB, BAO, Type Ia Supernova, H(z) measurements from cosmic chronometers, angular diameter measurements from Megamasers, growth measurements, and local SH0ES measurements, we found that dark energy component may act differently than a cosmological constant at early times. The observational data also does not disfavor a small interaction between dark energy and dark matter at late times. When using all these datasets in combination, our value of H0 agrees well with SH0ES results but in 2.5σ tension with Planck results. We also did AIC and BIC analysis, and we found that the cosmological data prefer coupled quintessence model over ΛCDM, although the chi-square per number of degrees of freedom test prefers the latter.
G. Zagatti et al JCAP05(2024)034
Cosmic birefringence is the in-vacuo, frequency independent rotation of the polarization plane of linearly polarized radiation, induced by a parity-violating term in the electromagnetic Lagrangian. We implement a harmonic estimator for the birefringence field that only relies on the CMB E to B mode cross-correlation, thus suppressing the effect of cosmic variance from the temperature field. We derive constraints from Planck public releases 3 and 4, revealing a cosmic birefringence power spectrum consistent with zero at about 2σ up to multipole L = 1500. Moreover, we find that the cross-correlations of cosmic birefringence with the CMB T-, E- and B-fields are also well compatible with null. The latter two cross-correlations are provided here for the first time up to L = 1500.