Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt

We recently showed how it is possible to use a cubic Galileon action to construct classical cosmological solutions that enter a contracting null energy condition (NEC) violating phase, bounce at finite values of the scale factor and exit into an expanding NEC-satisfying phase without encountering any singularities or pathologies. A drawback of these examples is that singular behavior is encountered at some time either just before or just after the NEC-violating phase. In this Letter, we show that it is possible to circumvent this problem by extending our method to actions that include the next order ${\cal L}_4$ Galileon interaction. Using this approach, we construct non-singular classical bouncing cosmological solutions that are non-pathological for all times.

David Seery

CppTransport is a numerical platform that can automatically generate and solve the evolution equations for the 2- and 3-point correlation functions (in field space and for the curvature perturbation) for any inflationary model with canonical kinetic terms. It makes no approximations beyond the applicability of tree-level perturbation theory. Given an input Lagrangian, CppTransport performs symbolic calculations to determine the 'Feynman rules' of the model and generates efficient C++ to integrate the correlation functions of interest. It includes a visualization suite that automates extraction of observable quantities from the raw n-point functions and generates high quality plots with minimal manual intervention. It is intended to be used as a collaborative platform, promoting the rapid investigation of models and systematizing their comparison with observation. This guide describes how to install and use the system, and illustrates its use through some simple examples.

David J. Mulryne

PyTransport constitutes a straightforward code written in C++ together with Python scripts which automatically edit, compile and run the C++ code as a Python module. It has been written for Unix-like systems (OS X and Linux). Primarily the module employs the transport approach to inflationary cosmology to calculate the tree-level power-spectrum and bispectrum of user specified models of multi-field inflation, accounting for all sub and super-horizon effects. The transport method we utilise means only coupled differential equations need to be solved, and the implementation presented here combines the speed of C++ with the functionality and convenience of Python. At present the code is restricted to canonical models. This document details the code and illustrates how to use it with a worked example.

Kerstin Perez, Kenny C. Y. Ng, John F. Beacom, Cora Hersh, Shunsaku Horiuchi, Roman Krivonos

We use NuSTAR observations of the Galactic Center to search for X-ray lines from the radiative decays of sterile neutrino dark matter. Finding no evidence of unknown lines, we set limits on the sterile neutrino mass and mixing angle. In most of the mass range 10-50 keV, these are now the strongest limits, at some masses improving upon previous limits by a factor of ~10. When combined with constraints on the primordial lepton asymmetry and structure formation, the allowed mass range of the the $\nu$MSM framework is reduced by more than half. Future NuSTAR observations may be able to cover much of the remaining parameter space.

Garrett Goon, Kurt Hinterbichler

Under the assumption that a UV theory does not display superluminal behavior, we ask what constraints on superluminality are satisfied in the effective field theory (EFT). We study two examples of effective theories: quantum electrodynamics (QED) coupled to gravity after the electron is integrated out, and the flat-space galileon. The first is realized in nature, the second is more speculative, but they both exhibit apparent superluminality around non-trivial backgrounds. In the QED case, we attempt, and fail, to find backgrounds for which the superluminal signal advance can be made larger than the putative resolving power of the EFT. In contrast, in the galileon case it is easy to find such backgrounds, indicating that if the UV completion of the galileon is (sub)luminal, quantum corrections must become important at distance scales of order the Vainshtein radius of the background configuration, much larger than the naive EFT strong coupling distance scale. Such corrections would be reminiscent of the non-perturbative Schwarzschild scale quantum effects that are expected to resolve the black hole information problem. Finally, a byproduct of our analysis is a calculation of how perturbative quantum effects alter charged Reissner-Nordstrom black holes.

Lawrence E. Kidder, Scott E. Field, Francois Foucart, Erik Schnetter, Saul A. Teukolsky, Andy Bohn, Nils Deppe, Peter Diener, François Hébert, Jonas Lippuner, Jonah Miller, Christian D. Ott, Mark A. Scheel, Trevor Vincent

We introduce a new relativistic astrophysics code, SpECTRE, that combines a discontinuous Galerkin method with a task-based parallelism model. SpECTRE's goal is to achieve more accurate solutions for challenging relativistic astrophysics problems such as core-collapse supernovae and binary neutron star mergers. The robustness of the discontinuous Galerkin method allows for the use of high-resolution shock capturing methods in regions where (relativistic) shocks are found, while exploiting high-order accuracy in smooth regions. A task-based parallelism model allows efficient use of the largest supercomputers for problems with a heterogeneous workload over disparate spatial and temporal scales. We argue that the locality and algorithmic structure of discontinuous Galerkin methods will exhibit good scalability within a task-based parallelism framework. We demonstrate the code on a wide variety of challenging benchmark problems in (non)-relativistic (magneto)-hydrodynamics. We demonstrate the code's scalability including its strong scaling on the NCSA Blue Waters supercomputer up to the machine's full capacity of 22,380 nodes using 671,400 threads.

F. Guzmán, N. R. Badnell, R. J. R. Williams, P. A. M. van Hoof, M. Chatzikos, G. J. Ferland

Cosmological models can be constrained by determining primordial abundances. Accurate predictions of the He I spectrum are needed to determine the primordial helium abundance to a precision of $< 1$% in order to constrain Big Bang Nucleosynthesis models. Theoretical line emissivities at least this accurate are needed if this precision is to be achieved. In the first paper of this series, which focused on H I, we showed that differences in $l$-changing collisional rate coefficients predicted by three different theories can translate into 10% changes in predictions for H I spectra. Here we consider the more complicated case of He atoms, where low-$l$ subshells are not energy degenerate. A criterion for deciding when the energy separation between $l$ subshells is small enough to apply energy-degenerate collisional theories is given. Moreover, for certain conditions, the Bethe approximation originally proposed by Pengelly & Seaton (1964) is not sufficiently accurate. We introduce a simple modification of this theory which leads to rate coefficients which agree well with those obtained from pure quantal calculations using the approach of Vrinceanu et al. (2012). We show that the $l$-changing rate coefficients from the different theoretical approaches lead to differences of $\sim 10$% in He I emissivities in simulations of H II regions using spectral code Cloudy.