Jerome Martin, Christophe Ringeval, Vincent Vennin

In the hope of avoiding model dependence of the cosmological observables, phenomenological parametrizations of Cosmic Inflation have recently been proposed. Typically, they are expressed in terms of two parameters associated with an expansion of the inflationary quantities matching the belief that inflation is characterized by two numbers only, the tensor-to-scalar ratio and the scalar spectral index. We give different arguments and examples showing that these new approaches are either not generic or insufficient to make predictions at the accuracy level needed by the cosmological data. We conclude that disconnecting inflation from high energy physics and gravity might not be the most promising way to learn about the physics of the early Universe.

Samir D. Mathur

It is conventionally believed that if a ball of matter of mass $M$ has a radius close to $2GM$ then it must collapse to a black hole. But string theory microstates (fuzzballs) have no horizon or singularity, and they do {\it not} collapse. We consider two simple examples from classical gravity to illustrate how this violation of our intuition happens. In each case the `matter' arises from an extra compact dimension, but the topology of this extra dimension is not trivial. The pressure and density of this matter diverge at various points, but this is only an artifact of dimensional reduction; thus we bypass results like Buchadahl's theorem. Such microstates give the entropy of black holes, so these topologically nontrivial constructions dominate the state space of quantum gravity.

Kaisey S. Mandel, Daniel Scolnic, Hikmatali Shariff, Ryan J. Foley, Robert P. Kirshner

Conventional Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) cosmology analyses currently use a simplistic linear regression of magnitude versus color and light curve shape, which does not model intrinsic SN Ia variations and host galaxy dust as physically distinct effects, resulting in low color-magnitude slopes. We construct a probabilistic generative model for the distribution of dusty extinguished absolute magnitudes and apparent colors as a convolution of the intrinsic SN Ia color-magnitude distribution and the host galaxy dust reddening-extinction distribution. If the intrinsic color-magnitude (M_B vs. B-V) slope beta_int differs from the host galaxy dust law R_B, this convolution results in a specific curve of mean extinguished absolute magnitude vs. apparent color. The derivative of this curve smoothly transitions from beta_int in the blue tail to R_B in the red tail of the apparent color distribution. The conventional linear fit approximates this effective curve at this transition near the average apparent color, resulting in an apparent slope beta_app between beta_int and R_B. We incorporate these effects into a hierarchical Bayesian statistical model for SN Ia light curve measurements, and analyze a dataset of SALT2 optical light curve fits of a compilation of 277 nearby SN Ia at z < 0.10. The conventional linear fit obtains beta_app = 3. Our model finds a beta_int = 2.2 +/- 0.3 and a distinct dust law of R_B = 3.7 +/- 0.3, consistent with the average for Milky Way dust, while correcting a systematic distance bias of ~0.10 mag in the tails of the apparent color distribution.

Carsten Rott, Seongjin In, Jason Kumar, David Yaylali

We consider the use of directionality in the search for monoenergetic sub-GeV neutrinos arising from the decay of stopped kaons, which can be produced by dark matter annihilation in the core of the Sun. When these neutrinos undergo charged-current interactions with a nucleus at a neutrino detector, they often eject a proton which is highly peaked in the forward direction. The direction of this track can be measured at DUNE, allowing one to distinguish signal from background by comparing on-source and off-source event rates. We find that directional information can enhance the signal to background ratio by up to a factor of 5.