Giulio Fabbian, Matteo Calabrese, Carmelita Carbone

We perform a complete study of the gravitational lensing effect beyond the Born approximation on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies using a multiple-lens raytracing technique through cosmological N-body simulations of the DEMNUni suite. The impact of second order effects accounting for the non-linear evolution of large-scale structures is evaluated propagating for the first time the full CMB lensing jacobian together with the light rays trajectory. We carefully investigate the robustness of our approach against several numerical effects in the raytracing procedure and in the N-body simulation itself, and found no evidence of large contaminations. We discuss the impact of beyond Born corrections on lensed CMB observables and show that the leading correction term is due to the rotation of the polarization basis induced by matter perturbations. We compare our results with recent analytical predictions that appeared in the literature finding very good agreement and extend these results to smaller angular scales. Finally we discuss the detection prospect of beyond Born effects with the future CMB-S4 experiment. We found that corrections to the B-modes power spectrum could be measured at $2\sigma$ level. Moreover the gravitational rotation signature will produce an effective anisotropic rotation of the Stokes parameter analogous to an anisotropic birefringence effect that could be constrained by CMB-S4.

Juan Garcia-Bellido, Ester Ruiz Morales

Primordial black holes (PBH) have been shown to arise from high peaks in the matter power spectra of multi-field models of inflation. Here we show, with a simple toy model, that it is also possible to generate a peak in the curvature power spectrum of single-field inflation. We assume that the effective dynamics of the inflaton field presents a near-inflection point which slows down the field right before the end of inflation and gives rise to a prominent spike in the fluctuation power spectrum at scales much smaller than those probed by Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Large Scale Structure (LSS) observations. This peak will give rise, upon reentry during the radiation era, to PBH via gravitational collapse. The mass and abundance of these PBH is such that they could constitute the totality of the Dark Matter today. We satisfy all CMB and LSS constraints and predict a very broad range of PBH masses. Some of these PBH are light enough that they will evaporate before structure formation, leaving behind a large curvature fluctuation on small scales. This broad mass distribution of PBH as Dark Matter will be tested in the future by AdvLIGO and LISA interferometers.

Daniele Bertacca, Alvise Raccanelli, Nicola Bartolo, Sabino Matarrese

Waveforms of gravitational waves provide information about a variety of parameters for the binary system merging. However, standard calculations have been performed assuming a FLRW universe with no perturbations. In reality this assumption should be dropped: we show that the inclusion of cosmological perturbations translates into corrections to the estimate of astrophysical parameters derived for the merging binary systems. We compute corrections to the estimate of the luminosity distance due to velocity, volume, lensing and gravitational potential effects. Our results show that the amplitude of the corrections will be negligible for current instruments, mildly important for experiments like the planned DECIGO, and very important for future ones such as the Big Bang Observer.

Hai-Chao Zhang

We tested a fifth force using cold atom experiments. The accelerated expansion of the universe implies the possibility of the presence of a scalar field throughout the universe driving the acceleration. This field would result in a detectable force between normal-matter objects. Theory of the chameleon field states that the force should be strong in a thin shell near the surface of a source object but greatly suppressed inside and outside of the source object. We used two atom clouds: one as the source and the other as the test mass; so the test mass can pass through the thin-shell region of the source mass. We detected the chameleon force and obtained the couple constant of about 4.5E11 between matter and the field. The chameleon force is considerably larger than Newtonian gravity at short distance; the interaction range is short enough to satisfy all experimental bounds on deviations from general relativity.

Erminia Calabrese, Renée A. Hložek, J. Richard Bond, Mark J. Devlin, Joanna Dunkley, Mark Halpern, Adam D. Hincks, Kent D. Irwin, Arthur Kosowsky, Kavilan Moodley, Laura B. Newburgh, Michael D. Niemack, Lyman A. Page, Blake D. Sherwin, Jonathan L. Sievers, David N. Spergel, Suzanne T. Staggs, Edward J. Wollack

We present cosmological constraints from the combination of the full mission 9-year WMAP release and small-scale temperature data from the pre-Planck ACT and SPT generation of instruments. This is an update of the analysis presented in Calabrese et al. 2013 and highlights the impact on $\Lambda$CDM cosmology of a 0.06 eV massive neutrino - which was assumed in the Planck analysis but not in the ACT/SPT analyses - and a Planck-cleaned measurement of the optical depth to reionization. We show that cosmological constraints are now strong enough that small differences in assumptions about reionization and neutrino mass give systematic differences which are clearly detectable in the data. We recommend that these updated results be used when comparing cosmological constraints from WMAP, ACT and SPT with other surveys or with current and future full-mission Planck cosmology. Cosmological parameter chains are publicly available on the NASA's LAMBDA data archive.