Matthew Baumgart, Jonathan J. Heckman, Logan Thomas

The strong constraints of conformal symmetry cause any nearly-conformal sector to blueshift tensor fluctuations in cosmology. Hidden sectors with approximate conformal symmetry, which may be quite large, are a well-motivated extension of physics beyond the Standard Models of particle physics and cosmology. They can therefore lead to a detectable shift in the tensor tilt for next-generation CMB and gravitational wave experiments. We compute the leading-order contribution to the in-in graviton two-point function from virtual loops in such sectors to demonstrate this universal effect. In units where a single conformally-coupled scalar is 1, limits from Stage-IV CMB experiments could bound the size of this extra sector to be smaller than about 10^15. This would be sufficient to rule out N-Naturalness as a complete resolution of the hierarchy problem.

Işıl Başaran Öz, Kazuharu Bamba

The solutions for the field equations of $f(R)$ gravity are investigated in static cylindrically symmetric space-time. Conserved quantities of the system, as well as unknown functions, can be determined with the help of the Noether symmetry method. In this article, some unknown values of the equations of state parameter (EoS) have emerged as a result of the constraints obtained by analyzing the Noether symmetry equations for the $f(R)=f_0 R$ case. Consequently, several new exact solutions have been found for cases of General Relativity in static cylindrically symmetrical space-time for the non-dust matter.

Yuba Amoura, Nicole E. Drakos, Anael Berrouet, James E. Taylor

The abundance of galaxy clusters in the low-redshift universe provides an important cosmological test, constraining a product of the initial amplitude of fluctuations and the amount by which they have grown since early times. The degeneracy of the test with respect to these two factors remains a limitation of abundance studies. Clusters will have different mean assembly times, however, depending on the relative importance of initial fluctuation amplitude and subsequent growth. Thus, structural probes of cluster age such as concentration, shape or substructure may provide a new cosmological test that breaks the main degeneracy in number counts. We review analytic predictions for how mean assembly time should depend on cosmological parameters, and test these predictions using cosmological simulations. Given the overall sensitivity expected, we estimate the cosmological parameter constraints that could be derived from the cluster catalogues of forthcoming surveys such as Euclid, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, eROSITA, or CMB-S4. We show that by considering the structural properties of their cluster samples, such surveys could easily achieve errors of $\Delta \sigma_8$ = 0.01 or better.