Antonio Padilla, Emma Platts, David Stefanyszyn, Anthony Walters, Amanda Weltman, Toby Wilson

Recently, it was argued that the conformal coupling of the chameleon to matter fields created an issue for early universe cosmology. As standard model degrees of freedom become non-relativistic in the early universe, the chameleon is attracted towards a "surfing" solution, so that it arrives at the potential minimum with too large a velocity. This leads to rapid variations in the chameleon's mass and excitation of high energy modes, casting doubts on the classical treatment at Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Here we present the DBI chameleon, a consistent high energy modification of the chameleon theory that dynamically renders it weakly coupled to matter during the early universe thereby eliminating the adverse effects of the `kicks'. This is done without any fine tuning of the coupling between the chameleon and matter fields, and retains its screening ability in the solar system. We demonstrate this explicitly with a combination of analytic and numerical results.

Satoshi Iso, Kazunori Kohri, Kengo Shimada

Small-field inflation (SFI) is widely considered to be unnatural because an extreme fine-tuning of the initial condition is necessary for sufficiently large e-folding. In this paper, we show that the unnaturally-looking initial condition can be dynamically realised without any fine-tuning if the SFI occurs after rapid oscillations of the inflaton field and particle creations by preheating. In fact, if the inflaton field $\phi$ is coupled to another scalar field $\chi$ through the interaction $g^2 \chi^2 \phi^2$ and the vacuum energy during the small field inflation is given by $\lambda M^4$, the initial value can be dynamically set at $(\sqrt{\lambda}/g) M^2/M_{\rm pl}$, which is much smaller than the typical scale of the potential $M.$ This solves the initial condition problem in the new inflation model or some classes of the hilltop inflation models.

Alkistis Pourtsidou

We investigate the possibility of testing Einstein's general theory of relativity (GR) and the standard cosmological model via the $E_{\rm G}$ statistic using neutral hydrogen (HI) intensity mapping. We generalise the Fourier space estimator for $E_{\rm G}$ to include HI as a biased tracer of matter and forecast statistical errors using HI clustering and lensing surveys that can be performed in the near future, in combination with ongoing and forthcoming optical galaxy and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) surveys. We find that fractional errors $< 1\%$ in the $E_{\rm G}$ measurement can be achieved in a number of cases and compare the ability of various survey combinations to differentiate between GR and specific modified gravity models. Measuring $E_{\rm G}$ with intensity mapping and the Square Kilometre Array can provide exquisite tests of gravity at cosmological scales.