Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2019-08-27 11:30 to 2019-08-30 12:30 | Next meeting is Friday Aug 8th, 11:30 am.
Primordial black holes (PBHs) may result from high peaks in a random field of cosmological perturbations. In single field inflationary models, such perturbations can be seeded as the inflaton overshoots a small barrier on its way down the potential. PBHs are then produced through two distinct mechanisms, during the radiation era. The first one is the familiar collapse of large adiabatic overdensities. The second one is the collapse induced by relic bubbles where the inflaton field is trapped in a false vacuum, due to large backward fluctuations which prevented horizon sized regions from overshooting the barrier. We consider (numerically and analytically) the effect of non-Gaussianities on the threshold for overdensities to collapse into a PBH. Since typical high peaks have some dispersion in their shape or profile, we also consider the effect of such dispersion on the corresponding threshold for collapse. With these results we estimate the most likely channel for PBH production as a function of the non-Gaussianity parameter $f_{\rm NL}$. We also compare the threshold for collapse coming from the perturbative versus the non perturbative template for the non-Gaussianity arising in this model. We show that i) for $f_{\rm NL}\gtrsim 3.5$, the population of PBH coming from false vacuum regions dominates over that which comes from the collapse of large adiabatic overdensities, ii) the non-perturbative template of the non-Gaussianities is important to get accurate results. iii) the effect of the dispersion is small in determining the threshold for the compaction function, although it is appreciable in determining the threshold amplitude for the curvature perturbation at low $f_{\rm NL}$. We also confirm that the volume averaged compaction function provides a very accurate universal estimator for the threshold.
We consider a gravity theory coupled to matter, where the matter has a higher-dimensional holographic dual. In such a theory, finding quantum extremal surfaces becomes equivalent to finding the RT/HRT surfaces in the higher-dimensional theory. Using this we compute the entropy of Hawking radiation and argue that it follows the Page curve, as suggested by recent computations of the entropy and entanglement wedges for old black holes. The higher-dimensional geometry connects the radiation to the black hole interior in the spirit of ER=EPR. The black hole interior then becomes part of the entanglement wedge of the radiation. Inspired by this, we propose a new rule for computing the entropy of quantum systems entangled with gravitational systems which involves searching for "islands" in determining the entanglement wedge.
We explore various tree-level double copy constructions for amplitudes including massive particles with spin. By working in general dimensions, we use that particles with spins $s\leq 2$ are fundamental to argue that the corresponding double copy relations partially follow from compactification of their massless counterparts. This massless origin fixes the coupling of gluons, dilatons and axions to matter in a characteristic way (for instance fixing the gyromagnetic ratio), whereas the graviton couples universally reflecting the equivalence principle. For spin-1 matter we conjecture all-order Lagrangians reproducing the interactions with up to two massive lines and we test them in a classical setup, where the massive lines represent spinning compact objects such as black holes. We also test the amplitudes via CHY formulae for both bosonic and fermionic integrands. At five points, we show that by applying generalized gauge transformations one can obtain a smooth transition from quantum to classical BCJ double copy relations for radiation, thereby providing a QFT derivation for the latter. As an application, we show how the theory arising in the classical double copy of Goldberger and Ridgway can be naturally identified with a certain compactification of $\mathcal{N}=4$ Supergravity.