Cosmological non Gaussianity from loop quantum cosmology

Tuesday, Mar 6th

Ivan Agullo, LSU
Title: Non-Gaussianity from LQC 
PDF of the talk (22M)
Audio+Slides [.mp4 19MB]

By Jorge Pullin,  LSU

The standard picture of cosmology is that the universe started in the "big bang" and then underwent a period of rapid expansion, called inflation. During those initial moments, densities are very high and matter is fused into a primordial "soup" that is opaque, light cannot travel through it. As the universe expands and cools, eventually electrons and protons form atoms and the universe becomes transparent to light. The afterglow of that initial phase can then travel freely through the universe and eventually reaches us. Due to the expansion of the universe that light "cools" (its frequency is lowered). In the 1960's to Bell Telephone Co. engineers were working on a microwave antenna and discovered a noise they could not get rid of. That noise was the afterglow of the Big Bang, that by then had cooled off into microwaves. That afterglow has been measured with increasing precision using satellites. It is remarkably homogeneous, if one looks into two different directions of the universe, the difference in temperature (frequency) of the microwave radiation is equal to one part in 100,000. The diagram below has those temperature differences magnified 100,000 times to make them visible, different colors correspond to different temperatures. The whole celestial sphere is mapped into the oval.

At first, it appears that the distribution of temperature is sort of random. But it is not, it has a lot of structure. To characterize the structure, one picks a direction and then moves away from it a certain angle and draws a circle of all directions forming the same angle with the original direction one picked. One then averages the temperature along the circle.  Then one averages the result for all possible initial choices of direction. If the distribution were truly random, if one plotted the average computed as a function of the angle, one would get a constant, no angle would be preferred over others. But what one gets is shown in the following diagram,

In the vertical are the averages, in the horizontal, the angles. The dots are experimental measurements. The continuous curve is what one gets if one evolves a quantum field through the inflationary period, starting from the most "quiescent" quantum state possible at the beginning, called "the vacuum state". The incredibly good agreement between theory and experiment is a great triumph of the inflationary model. The quantity plotted above is technically known as the "two point correlation". Loop quantum cosmology slightly changes the predictions of standard inflation, mostly for very large angles. There, the experimental measurements have a lot of uncertainty and are not able to tell us if loop quantum cosmology or traditional inflation give a better result. Perhaps in a few years better measurements will allow us to distinguish between them. If loop quantum cosmology is favored it would be a tremendously important experimental confirmation. But we are not there yet.

One can generalize the construction we made with two directions and an angle between them to three directions and three angles between them, and so on for higher number of directions. These would be known technically as the three point correlation, four point correlation, etc. If the distribution of temperatures were given by a probabilistic distribution known as a Gaussian, all the higher order correlations are determined by the two point correlation, there is no additional information in them. 

In this talk a study of the three point correlations for loop quantum cosmology was presented. It was shown that non-Gaussianities appear. That is, the three point correlation is not entirely determined by the two point one. Satellites are able to measure non-Gaussianities. In the talk it was shown that depending on the values chosen for the quantum fields at the beginning of the universe, the non-Gaussianities predicted by loop quantum gravity can be made compatible with experiment. This is not strictly speaking an experimental confirmation since one had a parameter one could adjust. But the good news is that the values needed to fit the data appear very natural. Again, future measurement should place tighter bounds on all this.

Image credits: Cosmic microwave background Wikipedia page.