Signatures of Excited Initial States and Tunneling in Landscape.

兴奋初始状态的特征和景观中的隧道。

• 批准号: 1521186
• 负责人: Sonia Paban
• 金额: $ 15万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-09-01 至 2018-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1521186&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Signatures; Excited; Initial; States; Tunneling

This award funds the research activities of Professor Sonia Paban at the University of Texas at Austin.A wealth of experimental data over the past two decades has led to a successful model of the evolution of the universe known as the Ë-CDM model. This model includes a sudden moment when space-time started expanding, followed by a period of exponential expansion known as cosmic inflation. At the end of cosmic inflation the universe looked pretty much the same in all directions and did not have a center; there were only slight variations due to the quantum nature of the fields. These predictions of cosmic inflation match extremely well the recent data collected on the Cosmic Microwave Background, and they are fairly robust in that they are mostly, but not completely, independent of the detailed structure of space-time before inflation began. Professor Paban will investigate whether the precision of future planned experiments is sufficient to shed light on that detailed structure. Another aspect of this project relates to quantum tunneling: a quantum particle can sometimes cross a barrier via a transition which is forbidden for a classical particle. One proposed explanation of dark energy involves the multiverse --- a landscape of universes. Transitions in the multiverse happen via quantum tunneling. Models of the multiverse contain a large number of fields, whereas most of what we know about quantum tunneling has been limited to a single field. As a result, research in this area advances the national interest by promoting the progress of science in one of its most fundamental directions: the discovery and understanding of the universe. Professor Paban will investigate the dependence of the tunneling rate on the number of fields. The broader impacts of this grant includes the mentoring of graduate students, who will collaborate in this research, as well as Professor Paban's continued mentoring of underrepresented minority undergraduate students.More technically, inflation has the power to erase initial anisotropies on the metric in few e-foldings. For this reason, it has been assumed that it will be impossible to tell if the pre-inflationary metric was anisotropic. Previous work by Paban and collaborators indicates that with the increased precision of projected observations (e.g., the 21cm experiments) it will be possible to exclude or detect such a scenario when the number of e-foldings is around 60. The work proposed here will tell if there is also a distinctive signature for Large Scale Structure measurements, ì-distortion measurements, and observations of oscillations in the power spectrum through a polarization measurement. This research will also determine if there is a distinctive signature in these three future experiments for inflationary periods that are preceded by tunneling and a period of fast-roll. Recent work claims that tunneling in a multi-dimensional space of fields is enhanced as the number of fields grows. This proposal seeks to reproduce or invalidate these results by means of independent computations, including use of exact results and numerical Monte Carlo techniques.

该奖项为德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的Sonia Paban教授的研究活动提供资金。在过去的二十年中，大量的实验数据导致了宇宙演变的成功模型，称为“ CDM”模型。该模型包括时空开始扩展的突然时刻，然后是指数膨胀时期称为宇宙通胀。在宇宙通货膨胀的尽头，宇宙在各个方向上看起来几乎相同，没有中心。由于磁场的量子性质，只有略有变化。这些对宇宙通货膨胀的预测非常匹配宇宙微波背景上的最新数据，并且它们相当强大，因为它们主要是完全但并非完全与通货膨胀开始之前的详细时空结构无关。 Paban教授将研究未来计划实验的精确度足以阐明该详细的结构。该项目的另一个方面与量子隧道有关：量子粒子有时可以通过禁止经典粒子的过渡越过屏障。一个建议的暗能量的解释涉及多元宇宙 - 宇宙的景观。多元宇宙中的过渡通过量子隧道发生。多元宇宙的模型包含大量字段，而我们对量子隧道的了解中的大多数都仅限于一个字段。结果，该领域的研究通过以最基本的方向之一来促进科学的进步来提高国家利益：对宇宙的发现和理解。 Paban教授将调查隧道率对田间数量的依赖性。这笔赠款的更广泛影响包括研究生的心理，他们将在这项研究中进行合作，以及Paban教授对不足代表的少数群体本科生的持续思维。从技术上讲，通货膨胀有能力消除少数电子折扣中该指标的初始各向异性。因此，已经假定无法确定通货膨胀前度量是否为各向异性。 Paban和合作者的先前工作表明，随着预计观察结果的越来越高的精度（例如21cm实验），当E折叠的数量约为60左右时，将排除或检测到这种情况。在这里提出的工作也将确定大规模结构测量以及在大规模阶段的偏差，i sour septortial otor的范围，以及iD阶段的范围内的独特签名，以及iD阶段的范围，iD阶段的范围，以及i的范围，; 测量。这项研究还将确定在未来的三个通货膨胀期间的实验中是否存在独特的签名，而这是在隧道之前和快速卷时期的。最近的工作声称，随着田地数量的增加，在田野的多维空间中进行隧道会增强。该建议旨在通过独立计算来再现或无效这些结果，包括使用精确的结果和数值蒙特卡洛技术。