Related papers: Light Scalars at the Cosmological Collider
The representation theory of de Sitter space allows for a category of partially massless particles which have no flat space analog, but could have existed during inflation. We study the couplings of these exotic particles to inflationary…
In this paper we consider that dark energy could be described solely by a complex scalar field with a Bose-Einstein condensate-like potential (denoted as CSFDE), that is, with a self-interaction and a mass term. In particular, we analyse a…
We explore the possibility that the interactions of a light scalar singlet, which mixes with the Standard Model~(SM) Higgs, also receive other UV contributions of comparable size. We focus, in particular, on the flavor aligned limit, where…
The latest DESI DR2 results, when combined with other independent cosmological data on the Cosmic Microwave Background and supernovas, suggest a preference for dynamical dark energy. We propose a novel cosmological scenario, which features…
I discuss here some of the constraints imposed by quantum and gravitational corrections on two hypothetical excitations, axions and quintessence, which have important cosmological implications. Although these corrections can be kept under…
We construct gravitational modifications that go beyond Horndeski, namely theories with extended nonminimal derivative couplings, in which the coefficient functions depend not only on the scalar field but also on its kinetic energy. Such…
We investigate the effects on cosmological clustering statistics of empirical biasing, where the galaxy distribution is a local transformation of the present-day Eulerian density field. The effects of the suppression of galaxy numbers in…
We discuss the effective infrared theory governing a light scalar's long wavelength dynamics in de Sitter spacetime. We show how the separation of scales around the physical curvature radius $k/a \sim H$ can be performed consistently with a…
We study the two-dimensional version of a quartic self-interacting quantum scalar field on a curved and noncommutative space (Snyder-de Sitter). We show that the model is renormalizable at the one-loop level and compute the beta functions…
We study the extent up to which the equivalence principle is obeyed in models of modified gravity and dark energy involving a single scalar degree of freedom. We focus on the effective field theories of dark energy describing the late time…
Recent calculations in both flat and de Sitter spacetimes have highlighted a tension between the decoupling of high-energy physics from low-energy degrees of freedom and the expectation that quantum systems decohere due to interactions with…
The behaviour of a massive, non-interacting and non-minimally coupled quantised scalar field in an expanding de Sitter background is investigated by solving the field evolution for an arbitrary initial state. In this approach there is no…
If supersymmetry is spontaneously at a low energy scale then the resulting gravitino would be very light. The interaction strength of the longitudinal components of such a light gravitino to electron-selectron pair then becomes comparable…
Weakly coupled, almost massless, spin 0 particles have been predicted by many extensions of the standard model of particle physics. Recently, the PVLAS group observed a rotation of polarization of electromagnetic waves in vacuum in the…
We explore the collision of two cylindrical bubbles in classical general relativity with a scalar field stress-energy tensor. Inside each bubble the field rests at a local minimum of the potential with non-negative energy density. Outside…
We explore a family of generalised scalar-tensor theories that exhibit self-tuning to low scale anti de Sitter vacua, even in the presence of a large cosmological constant. We are able to examine the linearised fluctuations about these…
Using dynamical systems methods, we describe the evolution of a minimally coupled scalar field and a Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker universe in the context of general relativity, which is relevant for inflation and late-time…
A formalism for the appearance of dark energy in the matter dominated era, leading to a persistent de Sitter expansion at the late time is proposed. Our framework is a hybrid quintessence model with a non-minimal coupling to the Ricci…
Scalar dark energy fields that couple to the Standard Model can give rise to observable signatures at the LHC. In this work we show that $t\bar t+$missing energy and mono-jet searches are suitable probes in the limit where the dark energy…
We study the response of a classical massless minimally coupled scalar to a static point scalar charge on de Sitter. By considering explicit solutions of the problem we conclude that -- even though the dynamics formally admits dilatation…