Tuesdays 10:30 - 11:30 | Fridays 11:30 - 12:30
Showing votes from 2016-04-08 12:30 to 2016-04-12 11:30 | Next meeting is Friday May 1st, 11:30 am.
A 2.5-3 sigma discrepancy has been reported between the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak (BAO) in the Lyman alpha forest at z=2.34 and the best fit Planck LCDM cosmology. To isolate the origin of the tension, we consider unanchored BAO, in which the standard BAO ruler is not calibrated, eliminating any dependence on cosmology before redshift z=2.34. We consider BOSS BAO measurements at z=0.32, 0.57 and 2.34, using the full 2-dimensional constraints on the best and worst determined combinations of the angular and line of sight BAO scale, as well as isotropic BAO measurements by 6dF and SDSS at z=0.106 and z=0.15. We find that the z>0.43 data alone is in 2.8 sigma of tension with LCDM with or without the Planck best fit values of the mass fraction and the BAO scale, indicating that the tension arises not from the LCDM parameters but from the dark energy evolution itself at 0.57<z<2.34. Including the low z BAO data, which is itself consistent with LCDM, reduces the tension to just over 2 sigma, however in this case a CPL parametrization of the dark energy evolution yields only a modest improvement.
We consider the possibility of creating a graviton laser. The lasing medium would be a system of contained, ultra cold neutrons. Ultra cold neutrons are a quantum mechanical system that interacts with gravitational fields and with the phonons of the container walls. It is possible to create a population inversion by pumping the system using the phonons. We compute the rate of spontaneous emission of gravitons and the rate of the subsequent stimulated emission of gravitons. The gain obtainable is directly proportional to the density of the lasing medium and the fraction of the population inversion. The applications of a graviton laser would be interesting.