A. Landry, M. B. Paranjape

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.

McCullen Sandora

We use the existence of habitable planets to impose anthropic requirements on the fine structure constant, $\alpha$. To this effect, we present two considerations that restrict its value to be very near the one observed. The first, that the end product of stellar fusion is iron and not one of its neighboring elements, restricts $\alpha^{-1}$ to be $145\pm 50$. The second, that radiogenic heat in the Earth's interior remains adequately productive for billions of years, restricts it to be $145\pm9$. A connection with the grand unified theory window is discussed, effectively providing a route to probe ultra-high energy physics with upcoming advances in planetary science. Help us improve arXiv so we can better serve you. Take our user survey.

Guillermo Ballesteros, Denis Comelli, Luigi Pilo

We study the effective field theory that describes the low-energy physics of self-gravitating media. The field content consists of four derivatively coupled scalar fields that can be identified with the internal comoving coordinates of the medium. Imposing SO(3) internal spatial invariance, the theory describes supersolids. Stronger symmetry requirements lead to superfluids, solids and perfect fluids, at lowest order in derivatives. In the unitary gauge, massive gravity emerges, being thus the result of a continuous medium propagating in spacetime. Our results can be used to explore systematically the effects and signatures of modifying gravity consistently at large distances. The dark sector is then described as a self-gravitating medium with dynamical and thermodynamic properties dictated by internal symmetries. These results indicate that the divide between dark energy and modified gravity, at large distance scales, is simply a gauge choice.

Anowar J. Shajib, Edward L. Wright

One of the physical features of a dark-energy-dominated universe is the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, which gives us a direct observational window to detect and study dark energy. The AllWISE data release of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has a large number of point sources, which span over a wide redshift range including where the ISW effect is maximized. AllWISE data is thus very well-suited for the ISW effect studies. In this study, we cross-correlate AllWISE galaxy and active galactic nucleus (AGN) overdensities with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe CMB temperature maps to detect the ISW effect signal. We calibrate the biases for galaxies and AGNs by cross-correlating the galaxy and AGN overdensities with the Planck lensing convergence map. We measure the ISW effect signal amplitudes relative to the {\Lambda}CDM expectation of $A=1$ to be $A=1.18 \pm 0.36$ for galaxies and $A=0.64 \pm 0.74$ for AGNs . The detection significances for the ISW effect signal are $3.3\sigma$ and $0.9\sigma$ for galaxies and AGNs respectively giving a combined significance of $3.4\sigma$. Our result is in agreement with the {\Lambda}CDM model.

Yohai Meiron, Bence Kocsis, Abraham Loeb

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) has recently discovered gravitational waves (GWs) emitted by merging black hole binaries. We examine whether future GW detections may identify triple companions of merging binaries. Such a triple companion causes variations in the GW signal due to (1) the varying path length along the line of sight during the orbit around the center of mass, (2) relativistic beaming, Doppler, and gravitational redshift, and (3) the variation of the "light"-travel time in the gravitational field of the triple companion, known respectively as Roemer-, Einstein-, and Shapiro-delays in pulsar binaries. We find that the prospects for detecting the triple companion are the highest for low-mass compact object binaries which spend the longest time in the LIGO frequency band with circular orbits. In particular, for merging neutron star binaries, LIGO may detect a white dwarf or M-dwarf perturber at signal to noise ratio of 8, if it is within 0.4 solar radius distance from the binary and the system is within a distance of 100 Mpc. Stellar (supermassive) black hole perturbers may be detected at a factor 5x (1000x) larger separations. Such pertubers in orbit around the merging binary emit GWs at frequencies above 1 mHz detectable by the Laser Interferometric Space Antenna (LISA) in coincidence.

Jonathan Braden, Matthew C. Johnson, Hiranya V. Peiris, Anthony Aguirre

Cosmic inflation, a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe, can give rise to large amplitude ultra-large scale inhomogeneities on distance scales comparable to or larger than the observable universe. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy on the largest angular scales is sensitive to such inhomogeneities and can be used to constrain the presence of ultra-large scale structure (ULSS). We numerically evolve nonlinear inhomogeneities present at the beginning of inflation in full General Relativity to assess the CMB quadrupole constraint on the amplitude of the initial fluctuations and the size of the observable universe relative to a length scale characterizing the ULSS. To obtain a statistically significant number of simulations, we adopt a toy model in which inhomogeneities are injected along a preferred direction. We compute the likelihood function for the CMB quadrupole including both ULSS and the standard quantum fluctuations produced during inflation. We compute the posterior given the observed CMB quadrupole, finding that when including gravitational nonlinearities, ULSS curvature perturbations of order unity are allowed by the data, even on length scales not too much larger than the size of the observable universe. Our results illustrate the utility and importance of numerical relativity for constraining early universe cosmology.