Particle horizon

About: Particle horizon is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2096 publications have been published within this topic receiving 69137 citations.

Holography from quantum cosmology

Abstract: The Weyl-Wigner-Groenewold-Moyal formalism of deformation quantization is applied to the closed Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmological model. We show that the phase space average for the surface of the apparent horizon is quantized in units of the Planck's surface, and that the total entropy of the universe is also quantized. Taking into account these two concepts, it is shown that 't Hooft conjecture on the cosmological holographic principle (CHP) in radiation and dust dominated quantum universes is satisfied as a manifestation of quantization. This suggests that the entire universe (not only inside the apparent horizon) can be seen as a two-dimensional information structure encoded on the apparent horizon.

A string scenario for inflationary cosmology

Abstract: We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of noncritical string theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production in the early stages of cosmological evolution. This is associated with the loss of information carried by global string modes that cross the particle horizon. It is the same loss of information that induces irreversible time flow when target time is identified with the worldsheet Liouville mode. The resulting scenario for inflation is described by a string analog of the Fokker-Planck equation that incorporates diffusion and dissipative effects. Cosmological density perturbations are naturally small.

Multi-horizon spherically symmetric spacetimes with several scales of vacuum energy

Abstract: We present a family of spherically symmetric multi-horizon spacetimes with a vacuum dark fluid, associated with a time-dependent and spatially inhomogeneous cosmological term. The vacuum dark fluid is defined in a model-independent way by the symmetry of its stress-energy tensor, i.e., its invariance under Lorentz boosts in a distinguished spatial direction ($p_r=-\rho$ for spherical symmetry), which makes the dark fluid essentially anisotropic and allows its density to evolve. The related cosmological models belong to the Lemaitre class of models with anisotropic fluids and describe a universe with several scales of vacuum energy related to phase transitions during its evolution. The typical behavior of solutions and the number of spacetime horizons are determined by the number of vacuum scales. We study in detail a model with three vacuum scales: GUT, QCD and that responsible for the present accelerated expansion. The model parameters are fixed by the observational data and by analyticity and causality conditions. We find that our Universe has three horizons. During the first inflation the Universe enters a T-region which makes the expansion irreversible. After the second phase transition at the QCD scale the Universe enters an R-region, where for a long time its geometry remains almost pseudo-Euclidean. After crossing the third horizon related to the present vacuum density, the Universe should enter the next T-region with inevitable expansion.

Transverse traceless gravitational waves in a spatially flat FLRW universe: Causal structure from dimensional reduction

Abstract: This work was mainly driven by the desire to explore, to what extent embedding some given geometry in a higher dimensional flat one is useful for understanding the causal structure of classical fields traveling in the former, in terms of that in the latter. We point out, in the 4D spatially flat FLRW universe, that the causal structure of transverse-traceless (TT) gravitational waves can be elucidated by first reducing the problem to a 2D Minkowski wave equation with a time dependent potential, where the relevant Green's function is pure tail -- waves produced by a physical source propagate strictly within the null cone. By viewing this 2D world as embedded in a 4D one, the 2D Green's function can also be seen to be sourced by a cylindrically symmetric scalar field in 3D. From both the 2D wave equation as well as the 3D scalar perspective, we recover the exact solution of the 4D graviton tail, for the case where the scale factor written in conformal time is a power law. There are no TT gravitational wave tails when the universe is radiation dominated because the background Ricci scalar is zero. In a matter dominated one, we estimate the amplitude of the tail to be suppressed relative to its null counterpart by both the ratio of the duration of the source to the age of the universe $\eta_0$, and the ratio of the observer-source spatial distance (at the observer's time) to the same $\eta_0$. In a universe driven primarily by a cosmological constant, the tail contribution to the background FLRW geometry after the source has ceased, is the conformal factor $a^2$ times a spacetime-constant symmetric matrix proportional to the spacetime volume integral of the TT part of the source's stress-energy-momentum tensor. In other words, massless spin-2 gravitational waves exhibit a tail-induced memory effect in 4D de Sitter spacetime.