Attempts to apply quantum collapse theories to Cosmology and cosmic inflation are reviewed. These attempts are motivated by the fact that the theory of cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin suffers from the single outcome problem, which is a modern incarnation of the quantum measurement problem, and that collapse models can provid...
The curvature perturbations produced during an early era of inflation are known to have quasi-Gaussian distribution functions close to their maximum, where they are well constrained by measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies and of the large-scale structures. In contrast, the tails of these distributions are poorly known, altho...
The supersymmetric R\'enyi entropy across a spherical entangling surface in a $d$-dimensional SCFT with flavor defects is equivalent to a supersymmetric partition function on $\mathbb{H}^{d-1} \times \mathbb{S}^1$, which can be computed exactly using localization. We consider the holographically dual BPS solutions in $(d +1)$-dimensional matter cou...
In approaches to quantum gravity, where smooth spacetime is an emergent approximation of a discrete Planckian fundamental structure, any effective smooth field theoretical description would miss part of the fundamental degrees of freedom and thus break unitarity. This is applicable also to trivial gravitational field (low energy) idealizations real...
We use modified traces to renormalize Lyubashenko's closed 3-manifold invariants coming from twist non-degenerate finite unimodular ribbon categories. Our construction produces new topological invariants which we upgrade to 2+1-TQFTs under the additional assumption of factorizability. The resulting functors provide monoidal extensions of Lyubashenk...
We propose a new derivation from the full Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) to the Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) improved $\bar{\mu}$-scheme effective dynamics, based on the reduced phase space formulation of LQG and a proposal of effective Hamiltonian/action in the full LQG. A key step of our program is an improved regularization of the full LQG Hamiltoni...
We propose a new paradigm for the thermal production of dark matter in the early universe, in which dark-matter particles acquire their mass and freeze out spontaneously from the thermal bath after a dark phase transition takes place. The decoupling arises because the dark-matter particles become suddenly non-relativistic and not because of any dec...
Published in The European Physical Journal D
Abstract We present analytical formulas for the vacuum-polarization Uehling potential in the case where the finite size of the nucleus is modeled by a Fermi charge distribution. Using a Sommerfeld-type development, the potential is expressed in terms of multiple derivatives of a particular integral. The latter and its derivatives can be evaluated e...
We calculate the Regge poles of the scattering matrix for a gravitating compact body, for scalar fields and for gravitational waves in the axial sector. For a neutron-star-like body, the spectrum exhibits two distinct branches of poles, labelled surface waves and broad resonances; for ultra-compact objects, the spectrum also includes a finite numbe...
After the end of inflation, the inflaton field oscillates around a local minimum of its potential and decays into ordinary matter. These oscillations trigger a resonant instability for cosmological perturbations with wavelengths that exit the Hubble radius close to the end of inflation. In this paper, we study the formation of Primordial Black Hole...
