We study compact configurations with a nontrivial wormholelike spacetime topology supported by a complex ghost scalar field with a quartic self-interaction. For this case, we obtain regular asymptotically flat equilibrium solutions possessing reflection symmetry. We then show their instability with respect to linear radial perturbations.

We propose a model of inflation capable of generating a population of light black holes (about ${10}^{-16}–{10}^{-14}$ solar masses) that might account for a significant fraction of the dark matter in the Universe. The effective potential of the model features an approximate inflection point arising from two-loop order logarithmic corrections in well-motivated and perturbative particle physics examples. This feature decelerates the inflaton before the end of inflation, enhancing the primordial spectrum of scalar fluctuations and triggering efficient black hole production with a peaked mass distribution. At larger field values, inflation occurs thanks to a generic small coupling between the inflaton and the curvature of spacetime. We compute accurately the peak mass and abundance of the primordial black holes using the Press-Schechter and Mukhanov-Sasaki formalisms, showing that the slow-roll approximation fails to reproduce the correct results by orders of magnitude. We study as well a qualitatively similar implementation of the idea, where the approximate inflection point is due to competing terms in a generic polynomial potential. In both models, requiring a significant part of the dark matter abundance to be in the form of black holes implies a small blue scalar tilt with a sizable negative running and a tensor spectrum that may be detected by the next-generation probes of the cosmic microwave background. We also comment on previous works on the topic.

Studying the smallest self-bound dark matter structure in our Universe can yield important clues about the fundamental particle nature of dark matter. Galaxy-scale strong gravitational lensing provides a unique way to detect and characterize dark matter substructures at cosmological distances from the Milky Way. Within the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm, the number of low-mass subhalos within lens galaxies is expected to be large, implying that their contribution to the lensing convergence field is approximately Gaussian and could thus be described by their power spectrum. We develop here a general formalism to compute from first principles the substructure convergence power spectrum for different populations of dark matter subhalos. As an example, we apply our framework to two distinct subhalo populations: a truncated Navarro-Frenk-White subhalo population motivated by standard CDM, and a truncated cored subhalo population motivated by self-interacting dark matter (SIDM). We study in detail how the subhalo abundance, mass function, internal density profile, and concentration affect the amplitude and shape of the substructure power spectrum. We determine that the power spectrum is mostly sensitive to a specific combination of the subhalo abundance and moments of the mass function, as well as to the average tidal truncation scale of the largest subhalos included in the analysis. Interestingly, we show that the asymptotic slope of the substructure power spectrum at large wave number reflects the internal density profile of the subhalos. In particular, the SIDM power spectrum exhibits a characteristic steepening at large wave number absent in the CDM power spectrum, opening the possibility of using this observable, if at all measurable, to discern between these two scenarios.

We investigate the standard model (SM) with a $U(1{)}_{B-L}$ gauge extension where a $B-L$ charged scalar is a viable dark matter (DM) candidate. The dominant annihilation process, for the DM particle is through the $B-L$ symmetry breaking scalar to a right-handed neutrino pair. We exploit the effect of decay and inverse decay of the right-handed neutrino in thermal relic abundance of the DM. Depending on the values of the decay rate, the DM relic density can be significantly different from what is obtained in the standard calculation assuming the right-handed neutrino is in thermal equilibrium and there appear different regions of the parameter space satisfying the observed DM relic density. For a DM mass less than $\mathcal{O}(\mathrm{TeV})$, the direct detection experiments impose a competitive bound on the mass of the $U(1{)}_{B-L}$ gauge boson $Z^{\prime }$ with the collider experiments. Utilizing the nonobservation of the displaced vertices arising from the right-handed neutrino decays, the bound on the mass of $Z^{\prime }$ has been obtained at present and higher luminosities at the LHC with 14 TeV center of mass energy where an integrated luminosity of $100{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$ is sufficient to probe $m_{Z^{\prime }}\sim 5.5\mathrm{TeV}$.

In this work, we consider tunneling between nonmetastable states in gravitational theories. Such processes arise in various contexts, e.g., in inflationary scenarios where the inflaton potential involves multiple fields or multiple branches. They are also relevant for bubble wall nucleation in some cosmological settings. However, we show that the transition amplitudes computed using the Euclidean method generally do not approach the corresponding field theory limit as $M_p\to \infty$. This implies that in the Euclidean framework, there is no systematic expansion in powers of $G_N$ for such processes. Such considerations also carry over directly to no-boundary scenarios involving Hawking-Turok instantons. In this note, we illustrate this failure of decoupling in the Euclidean approach with a simple model of axion monodromy and then argue that the situation can be remedied with a Lorentzian prescription such as the Picard-Lefschetz theory. As a proof of concept, we illustrate with a simple model how tunneling transition amplitudes can be calculated using the Picard-Lefschetz approach.

Based on the rigid positive energy theorem we proved the uniqueness of static spherically symmetric traversable wormholes with two asymptotically flat ends, being the higher-dimensional solutions of Einstein scalar phantom field. The proof is valid under the auxiliary condition imposed on wormhole mass and scalar charge.

We discuss the two-dimensional Grassmannian sigma model ${\mathbb{G}}_{N,M}$ on a finite interval $L$. The different boundary conditions which allow one to obtain analytical solutions by the saddle-point method in the large $N$ limit are considered. The nontrivial phase structure of the model on the interval similar to the $\mathbb{C}P(N)$ model is found.

We consider computational complexity of ${\mathrm{AdS}}_5$ black holes. Our system contains a particle moving on the boundary of AdS. This corresponds to the insertion of a fundamental string in ${\mathrm{AdS}}_5$ bulk spacetime. Our results give a constraint for complexity. This gives us a hint for defining complexity in quantum field theories.

We study a three-loop five-propagator Feynman integral, which we call the vacuum seagull, with arbitrary masses and spacetime dimension using the symmetries of Feynman integrals method. It is our first example with potential numerators. We determine the associated group $G\subset GL(3)$ which happens to be five dimensional and the associated set of five differential equations. $G$ is determined by a geometric approach which we term “current freedom.” We find the generic $G$-orbit to be co-dimension 0 and hence the method is maximally effective, and the diagram reduces to a line integral over simpler diagrams. For a reduced parameter space with three mass scales, we are able to present explicit results in terms of special functions for general dimension along with the $\epsilon$ expansion around $d=4$. This might be the first such example.

The properties of precessing, coalescing binary black holes are presently inferred through comparison with two approximate models of compact binary coalescence. In this work we show that these two models often disagree substantially when binaries have modestly large spins ($a\gtrsim 0.4$) and modest mass ratios ($q\gtrsim 2$). We demonstrate these disagreements using standard figures of merit and the parameters inferred for recent detections of binary black holes. By comparing to numerical relativity, we confirm that these disagreements reflect systematic errors. We provide concrete examples to demonstrate that these systematic errors can significantly impact inferences about astrophysically significant binary parameters. For the immediate future, parameter inference for binary black holes should be performed with multiple models (including numerical relativity), and carefully validated by performing inference under controlled circumstances with similar synthetic events.

We derive the conditions whereby null rays “defocus” within infinite derivative gravity for perturbations around an (A)dS background, and show that it is therefore possible to avoid singularities within this framework. This is in contrast to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, where singularities are generated unless the null energy condition is violated. We further extend this to an (A)dS-Bianchi I background metric, and also give an example of a specific perturbation where defocusing is possible given certain conditions.

For static, spherically symmetric space-times in general relativity (GR), a no-go theorem is proved: it excludes the existence of wormholes with flat and/or anti–de Sitter asymptotic regions on both sides of the throat if the source matter is isotropic, i.e., the radial and tangential pressures coincide. It explains why in all previous attempts to build such solutions it was necessary to introduce boundaries with thin shells that manifestly violate the isotropy of matter. Under a simple assumption on the behavior of the spherical radius $r(x)$, we obtain a number of examples of wormholes with isotropic matter and one or both de Sitter asymptotic regions, allowed by the no-go theorem. We also obtain twice asymptotically flat wormholes with anisotropic matter, both symmetric and asymmetric with respect to the throat, under the assumption that the scalar curvature is zero. These solutions may be on equal grounds interpreted as those of GR with a traceless stress-energy tensor and as vacuum solutions in a brane world. For such wormholes, the traversability conditions and gravitational lensing properties are briefly discussed. As a byproduct, we obtain twice asymptotically flat regular black hole solutions with up to four Killing horizons. As another byproduct, we point out intersection points in families of integral curves for the function $A(x)=g_{tt}$, parametrized by its values on the throat.

The relativistic generalization of the Newtonian Lagrangian perturbation theory is investigated. In previous works, the perturbation and solution schemes that are generated by the spatially projected gravitoelectric part of the Weyl tensor were given to any order of the perturbations, together with extensions and applications for accessing the nonperturbative regime. We here discuss more in detail the general first-order scheme within the Cartan formalism including and concentrating on the gravitational wave propagation in matter. We provide master equations for all parts of Lagrangian-linearized perturbations propagating in the perturbed spacetime, and we outline the solution procedure that allows one to find general solutions. Particular emphasis is given to global properties of the Lagrangian perturbation fields by employing results of Hodge–de Rham theory. We here discuss how the Hodge decomposition relates to the standard scalar-vector-tensor decomposition. Finally, we demonstrate that we obtain the known linear perturbation solutions of the standard relativistic perturbation scheme by performing two steps: first, by restricting our solutions to perturbations that propagate on a flat unperturbed background spacetime and, second, by transforming to Eulerian background coordinates with truncation of nonlinear terms.

By using the effective field theory approach, we investigate the role of initial conditions for the dark energy or modified gravity models. In detail, we consider the constant and linear parametrization of the effective Newton constant models. First, under the adiabatic assumption, the correction from the extra scalar degree of freedom in the beyond $\mathrm{\Lambda }\mathrm{CDM}$ model is found to be negligible. The dominant ingredient in this setup is the primordial curvature perturbation originated from the inflation mechanism, and the energy budget of the matter components is not very crucial. Second, the isocurvature perturbation sourced by the extra scalar field is studied. For the constant and linear models of the effective Newton constant, no such kind of scalar mode exists. For the quadratic model, there is a nontrivial one. However, the amplitude of the scalar field is damped away very fast on all scales. Consequently, it could not support a reasonable structure formation. Finally, we study the importance of the setup of the scalar field starting time. By setting different turn-on times, namely, $a={10}^{-2}$ and $a={10}^{-7}$, we compare the cosmic microwave background radiation temperature, lensing deflection angle autocorrelation function, and the matter power spectrum in the constant and linear models. We find there is an order of $\mathcal{O}(1\%)$ difference in the observable spectra for constant model, while for the linear model, it is smaller than $\mathcal{O}(0.1\%)$.

We investigate the proposed connection between de Sitter spacetime and the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) tensor network, and ask what can be learned via such a construction. We show that the quantum state obeys a cosmic no-hair theorem: the reduced density operator describing a causal patch of the MERA asymptotes to a fixed point of a quantum channel, just as spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant asymptote to de Sitter space. The MERA is potentially compatible with a weak form of complementarity (local physics only describes single patches at a time, but the overall Hilbert space is infinite dimensional) or, with certain specific modifications to the tensor structure, a strong form (the entire theory describes only a single patch plus its horizon, in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space). We also suggest that de Sitter evolution has an interpretation in terms of circuit complexity, as has been conjectured for anti–de Sitter space.

We study the detectability of large-scale velocity (Doppler) effects on redshift-space galaxy clustering, by simulating galaxy surveys and combining different types of tracers of large-scale structure. We employ a set of lognormal mocks that simulate a $20.000{\mathrm{deg}}^2$ near-complete survey up to $z=0.8$, in which each galaxy mock traces the spatial distribution of dark matter of that mock with a realistic bias prescription. We find that the ratios of the monopoles of the power spectra of different types of tracers carry most of the information that can be extracted from a multitracer analysis. In particular, we show that by employing optimal multitracer weights to compute the redshift-space power spectra it will be possible to detect Doppler effects with $\gtrsim 3\sigma$, while using suboptimal weights would lower this threshold below $3\sigma$. Finally, we investigate the potential degeneracy of these effects with the (local) non-Gaussianity parameter $f_{\mathrm{NL}}$, and how large-scale Doppler contributions could be mistaken for the signatures of primordial non-Gaussianity.