Interactions of cosmological gravitational waves and magnetic fields

The energy momentum tensor of a magnetic field always contains a spin-2 component in its anisotropic stress and therefore generates gravitational waves. It has been argued in the literature (Caprini & Durrer \cite{CD}) that this gravitational wave production can be very strong and that back-reaction cannot be neglected. On the other hand, a gravitational wave background does affect the evolution of magnetic fields. It has also been argued (Tsagas et al. \cite{Tsagas:2001ak},\cite{Tsagas:2005ki}) that this can lead to very strong amplification of a primordial magnetic field. In this paper we revisit these claims and study back reaction to second order.Comment: Added references, accepted for publication in PR

Constraints on the neutrino mass and the cosmological constant from large scale structure observations

The observational data on the large scale structure (LSS) of the Universe are used to establish the upper limit on the neutrino content marginalized over all other cosmological parameters within the class of adiabatic inflationary models. It is shown that the upper 2$\sigma$ limit on the neutrino content can be expressed in the form $\Omega_{\nu}h^2/N_{\nu}^{0.64}\le0.042$ or, via the neutrino mass, $m_{\nu}\le4.0$eV.Comment: 5 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the CAPP2000 Conference, Verbier, Switzerland, July, 200

Testing Superstring Theories with Gravitational Waves

We provide a simple transfer function that determines the effect of an early matter dominated era on the gravitational wave background and show that a large class of compactifications of superstring theory might be tested by observations of the gravitational wave background from inflation. For large enough reheating temperatures > 10^9 \GeV the test applies to all models containing at least one scalar with mass < 10^{12}\GeV that acquires a large initial oscillation amplitude after inflation and has only gravitational interaction strength, i.e., a field with the typical properties of a modulus.Comment: 5 pages 2 figures, v2: changes in presentation, refs revised, matches version in print in PR

CMB anisotropies in the presence of a stochastic magnetic field

Primordial magnetic fields present since before the epoch of matter-radiation equality have an effect on the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. The CMB anisotropies due to scalar perturbations are calculated in the gauge invariant formalism for magnetized adiabatic initial conditions. Furthermore the linear matter power spectrum is calculated. Numerical solutions are complemented by a qualitative analysis.Comment: 26 pages, 21 figures; sections 2 and 4 expanded; matches version published in PR

Tachyonic perturbations in AdS5_5 orbifolds

We show that scalar as well as vector and tensor metric perturbations in the Randall-Sundrum II braneworld allow normalizable tachyonic modes, i.e., possible instabilities. These instabilities require nonvanishing initial anisotropic stresses on the brane. We show with a specific example that within the Randall-Sundrum II model, even though the tachyonic modes are excited, no instability develops. We argue, however, that in the cosmological context instabilities might in principle be present. We conjecture that the tachyonic modes are due to the singularity of the orbifold construction. We illustrate this with a simple but explicit toy model.Comment: 11 pages, matches published versio

Large Scale Structure Formation with Global Topological Defects. A new Formalism and its implementation by numerical simulations

We investigate cosmological structure formation seeded by topological defects which may form during a phase transition in the early universe. First we derive a partially new, local and gauge invariant system of perturbation equations to treat microwave background and dark matter fluctuations induced by topological defects or any other type of seeds. We then show that this system is well suited for numerical analysis of structure formation by applying it to seeds induced by fluctuations of a global scalar field. Our numerical results are complementary to previous investigations since we use substantially different methods. The resulting microwave background fluctuations are compatible with older simulations. We also obtain a scale invariant spectrum of fluctuations with about the same amplitude. However, our dark matter results yield a smaller bias parameter compatible with $b\sim 2$ on a scale of $20 Mpc$ in contrast to previous work which yielded to large bias factors. Our conclusions are thus more positive. According to the aspects analyzed in this work, global topological defect induced fluctuations yield viable scenarios of structure formation and do better than standard CDM on large scales.Comment: uuencoded, compressed tar-file containing the text in LaTeX and 12 Postscript Figures, 41 page

Gravitational waves from stochastic relativistic sources: primordial turbulence and magnetic fields

The power spectrum of a homogeneous and isotropic stochastic variable, characterized by a finite correlation length, does in general not vanish on scales larger than the correlation scale. If the variable is a divergence free vector field, we demonstrate that its power spectrum is blue on large scales. Accounting for this fact, we compute the gravitational waves induced by an incompressible turbulent fluid and by a causal magnetic field present in the early universe. The gravitational wave power spectra show common features: they are both blue on large scales, and peak at the correlation scale. However, the magnetic field can be treated as a coherent source and it is active for a long time. This results in a very effective conversion of magnetic energy in gravitational wave energy at horizon crossing. Turbulence instead acts as a source for gravitational waves over a time interval much shorter than a Hubble time, and the conversion into gravitational wave energy is much less effective. We also derive a strong constraint on the amplitude of a primordial magnetic field when the correlation length is much smaller than the horizon.Comment: Replaced with revised version accepted for publication in Phys Rev

Universal upper limit on inflation energy scale from cosmic magnetic field

Recently observational lower bounds on the strength of cosmic magnetic fields were reported, based on gamma-ray flux from distant blazars. If inflation is responsible for the generation of such magnetic fields then the inflation energy scale is bounded from above as rho_{inf}^{1/4} < 2.5 times 10^{-7}M_{Pl} times (B_{obs}/10^{-15}G)^{-2} in a wide class of inflationary magnetogenesis models, where B_{obs} is the observed strength of cosmic magnetic fields. The tensor-to-scalar ratio is correspondingly constrained as r< 10^{-19} times (B_{obs}/10^{-15}G)^{-8}. Therefore, if the reported strength B_{obs} \geq 10^{-15}G is confirmed and if any signatures of gravitational waves from inflation are detected in the near future, then our result indicates some tensions between inflationary magnetogenesis and observations.Comment: 12pages, v2: several discussions and references added, version accepted for publication by JCA

Cosmic Microwave Background Anisotropies from Scaling Seeds: Global Defect Models

We investigate the global texture model of structure formation in cosmogonies with non-zero cosmological constant for different values of the Hubble parameter. We find that the absence of significant acoustic peaks and little power on large scales are robust predictions of these models. However, from a careful comparison with data we conclude that at present we cannot safely reject the model on the grounds of present CMB data. Exclusion by means of galaxy correlation data requires assumptions on biasing and statistics. New, very stringent constraints come from peculiar velocities. Investigating the large-N limit, we argue that our main conclusions apply to all global O(N) models of structure formation.Comment: LaTeX file with RevTex, 27 pages, 23 eps figs., submitted to Phys. Rev. D. A version with higher quality images can be found at http://mykonos.unige.ch/~kunz/download/lam.tar.gz for the LaTeX archive and at http://mykonos.unige.ch/~kunz/download/lam.ps.gz for the compiled PostScript fil