Related papers: Unavoidable shear from quantum fluctuations in con…
In the standard inflationary paradigm the inhomogeneities observed in the CMB arise from quantum fluctuations of an initially homogeneous and isotropic vacuum state. This picture suffers from two well-known weaknesses. First, it assumes…
Cosmological observables rely heavily on summary statistics such as two-point correlation functions. In many practical cases (e.g. the weak-lensing cosmic shear), those correlation functions are estimated from a finite, discrete sample of…
We rigorously establish that, in disordered three-dimensional (3D) isotropic solids, the stress autocorrelation function presents anisotropic terms that decay as $1/r^3$ at long-range, with $r$ the distance, as soon as either pressure or…
The phenomenon of energy cascade is addressed in the case of free-shear flows, modeled with the equations for incompressible Newtonian fluids with mixed periodic and free-slip boundary conditions driven by an imposed mean shear profile. The…
Simple homogeneous shear flows of frictionless, deformable particles are studied by particle simulations at large shear rates and for differently soft, deformable particles. The particle stiffness sets a time-scale that can be used to scale…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure provides a direct measurement of matter fluctuations in the universe. We report a measurement of this `cosmic shear' based on 271 WFPC2 archival images from the Hubble Space Telescope Medium Deep Survey…
From calculations of the variance of fluctuations and of the mean of the energy density of a massless scalar field in the Minkowski vacuum as a function of an intrinsic scale defined by the world function between two nearby points (as used…
We analyze the expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor and its fluctuations in quantum field theory on curved spacetimes $\langle T_{ab} \rangle$. A generally accepeted condition for the conceptual consistency of semiclassical…
We simulate a relaxation process of non-brownian particles in a sheared viscous medium; the small shear strain is initially applied to a system, which then undergoes relaxation. The relaxation time and the correlation length are estimated…
During the inflationary phase of the early universe, quantum fluctuations in the vacuum generate particles as they stretch beyond the Hubble length. These fluctuations are thought to result in the density fluctuations and gravitational…
We analyze fluctuations of particle displacements and stresses in a sheared athermal suspension of elastic capsules (red blood cells). Upon variation of the volume fraction from the dilute up to the highly concentrated regime, our numerical…
The cosmological constant problem is turned around to argue for a new foundational physics postulate underlying a consistent quantum theory of gravity and matter, such as string theory. This postulate is a quantum equivalence principle…
We use numerical simulations to study the flow of a bidisperse mixture of athermal, frictionless, soft-core two dimensional spherocylinders driven in uniform steady state shear. Energy dissipation is via a viscous drag with respect to a…
Primordial fluctuations in inflationary cosmology acquire classical properties through decoherence when their wavelengths become larger than the Hubble scale. Although decoherence is effective, it is not complete, so a significant part of…
Can local fluctuations of a ``Quintessence'' scalar field play a dynamical role in the gravitational clustering and cosmic structure formation process? We address this question in the general framework of scalar-tensor theories of gravity.…
The evolution equation for the shear is reobtained for a spherically symmetric anisotropic, viscous dissipative fluid distribution, which allows us to investigate conditions for the stability of the shear-free condition. The specific case…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
We investigate the backreaction of the quantum fluctuations of a very light ($m \!\lesssim\! H_{\text{today}}$) nonminimally coupled spectator scalar field on the expansion dynamics of the Universe. The one-loop expectation value of the…
We study the dynamics of the Bianchi I universe in modified loop quantum cosmology (mLQC-I) and uncover a robust mechanism for isotropization: the shear is dynamically suppressed after the bounce and decays rapidly in the quantum…
By minimizing the enthalpy of packings of frictionless particles, we obtain jammed solids at desired pressures and hence investigate the jamming transition with and without shear. Typical scaling relations of the jamming transition are…