Jia Liu, 2), J. Colin Hill, Blake D. Sherwin, Andrea Petri, Vanessa Böhm, Zoltán Haiman, (2) Columbia Univ., (3) UC Berkeley, (4) MPA)

Unprecedentedly precise cosmic microwave background (CMB) data are expected from ongoing and near-future CMB Stage-III and IV surveys, which will yield reconstructed CMB lensing maps with effective resolution approaching several arcminutes. The small-scale CMB lensing fluctuations receive non-negligible contributions from nonlinear structure in the late-time density field. These fluctuations are not fully characterized by traditional two-point statistics, such as the power spectrum. Here, we use $N$-body ray-tracing simulations of CMB lensing maps to examine two higher-order statistics: the lensing convergence one-point probability distribution function (PDF) and peak counts. We show that these statistics contain significant information not captured by the two-point function, and provide specific forecasts for the ongoing Stage-III Advanced Atacama Cosmology Telescope (AdvACT) experiment. Considering only the temperature-based reconstruction estimator, we forecast 30$\sigma$ (PDF) and 10$\sigma$ (peaks) detections of these statistics with AdvACT. Our simulation pipeline fully accounts for the non-Gaussianity of the lensing reconstruction noise, which is significant and cannot be neglected. Combining the power spectrum, PDF, and peak counts for AdvACT will tighten cosmological constraints in the $\Omega_m$-$\sigma_8$ plane by $\approx 30\%$, compared to using the power spectrum alone.

Alan Kostelecky, Adrian C. Melissinos, Matthew Mewes

We study the prospects for using interferometers in gravitational-wave detectors as tools to search for photon-sector violations of Lorentz symmetry. Existing interferometers are shown to be exquisitely sensitive to tiny changes in the effective refractive index of light occurring at frequencies around and below the microhertz range, including at the harmonics of the frequencies of the Earth's sidereal rotation and annual revolution relevant for tests of Lorentz symmetry. We use preliminary data obtained by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in 2006-2007 to place constraints on coefficients for Lorentz violation in the photon sector exceeding current limits by about four orders of magnitude.

Rouven Essig, Jeremy Mardon, Oren Slone, Tomer Volansky

We explore a new low-threshold direct-detection concept for dark matter, based on the breaking of chemical bonds between atoms. This includes the dissociation of molecules and the creation of defects in a lattice. With thresholds of a few to 10's of eV, such an experiment could probe the nuclear couplings of dark matter particles as light as a few MeV. We calculate the expected rates for dark matter to break apart diatomic molecules, which we take as a case study for more general systems. We briefly mention ideas for how chemical-bond breaking might be detected in practice. We also discuss the possibility of detecting solar neutrinos, including pp neutrinos, with this experimental concept. With an event rate of $\mathcal{O}$(0.1/kg-year), large exposures are required, but measuring low-energy solar neutrinos would provide a crucial test of the solar model.

Anna M. Nobili

The Universality of Free Fall and the Weak Equivalence Principle, which are at the basis of General Relativity, have been confirmed to 1 part in 10^13. Space experiments with macroscopic test masses of different composition orbiting the Earth inside a low altitude satellite aim at improving this precision by two orders of magnitude (with the Microscope satellite, launched on 25 April 2016) and up to four orders of magnitude (with the 'Galileo Galilei' - GG satellite). At such a high precision many tiny effects must be taken into account in order to be ruled out as the source of a spurious violation signal. In this work we investigate the general relativistic effects, including those which involve the rotation of both the source body and the test masses, and show that they are by far too small to be considered even in the most challenging experiment.

S. H. Pereira, A. Pinho S. S., J. M. Hoff da Silva, J. F. Jesus

In this work the exact Friedmann-Robertson-Walker equations for an Elko spinor field coupled to gravity in a Einstein-Cartan framework are presented. The torsion functions coupling the Elko field spin-connection to gravity can be exactly solved and the FRW equations for the system assume a relatively simple form. In the limit of a slowly varying Elko spinor field there is a relevant contribution to the field equations acting exactly as a time varying cosmological model $\Lambda(t)=\Lambda_*+\nu H^2$, where $\Lambda_*$ and $\nu$ are constants. Observational data using distance luminosity from magnitudes of supernovae constraint the parameters $\Omega_m$ and $\nu$, which leads to a lower limit to the Elko mass. Such model mimics, then, the effects of a dark energy fluid, here sourced by the Elko spinor field.

Ali Kaya

Recently a new no-global-recollapse argument was given for some inhomogeneous and anisotropic cosmologies that utilizes surface deformation by the mean curvature flow. In this paper we discuss important properties of the mean curvature flow of spacelike surfaces in Lorentzian manifolds. We show that singularities may form during cosmic evolution and the theorems forbidding the global recollapse lose their validity. The time evolution of the spatial scalar curvature that may kinematically prevent the recollapse is determined in normal coordinates, which shows the impact of inhomogeneities explicitly. Our analysis indicates a caveat in numerical solutions that give rise to inflation.

Hye-Sung Lee, Min-Seok Seo

There has been rapidly growing interest in the past decade in a new gauge boson which is considerably lighter than the standard model Z boson. A well-known example of this kind is the so-called dark photon, and it is actively searched for in various experiments nowadays. It would be puzzling to have a new gauge boson which is neither massless nor electroweak scale, but possesses a rather small yet nonzero mass. We present a mechanism that can provide a light gauge boson as a result of a mass matrix diagonalization.

Daniele Bertolini, Mikhail P. Solon

We apply an orthogonalization procedure on the effective field theory of large scale structure (EFT of LSS) shapes, relevant for the angle-averaged bispectrum and non-Gaussian covariance of the matter power spectrum at one loop. Assuming natural-sized EFT parameters, this identifies a linear combination of EFT shapes - referred to as the principal shape - that gives the dominant contribution for the whole kinematic plane, with subdominant combinations suppressed by a few orders of magnitude. For the covariance, our orthogonal transformation is in excellent agreement with a principal component analysis applied to available data. Additionally we find that, for both observables, the coefficients of the principal shapes are well approximated by the EFT coefficients appearing in the squeezed limit, and are thus measurable from power spectrum response functions. Employing data from N-body simulations for the growth-only response, we measure the single EFT coefficient describing the angle-averaged bispectrum with $\mathcal{O}(10\%)$ precision. These methods of shape orthogonalization and measurement of coefficients from response functions are valuable tools for developing the EFT of LSS framework, and can be applied to more general observables.