Contracting cosmologies are known to be flawed with a shear instability, where the contribution from the anisotropic stress to the overall energy density grows as $a^{-6}$, with $a$ the scale factor. Classically, whether or not this contribution becomes important before the bounce depends on its initial value, which can always be sufficiently fine ...
We propose a $1/N$ expansion of Starobinsky and Yokoyama's effective stochastic approach for light quantum fields on superhorizon scales in de Sitter spacetime. We explicitly compute the spectrum and the eigenfunctions of the Fokker-Planck operator for a O($N$)-symmetric theory with quartic selfinteraction at leading and next-to-leading orders in t...
We consider the approach to gravity in which four-dimensional curved spacetime is represented by a surface in a flat Minkowski space of higher dimension. After a short overview of the ideas and results of such an approach we concentrate on the study of the so-called splitting gravity, a form of this description in which constant value surface of a ...
Until recently, table-top tests of quantum gravity (QG) were thought to be practically impossible. However, due to a radical new approach to testing QG that uses principles of quantum information theory (QIT) and quantum technology, such tests now seem, remarkably, within sight. In particular, a promising test has been proposed where the generation...
We present a model for the coupling of non-relativistic quantum systems with a linearized gravitational field from a Lagrangian formulation. The coupling strongly resembles the light-matter interaction models that are known to be well approximated by the Unruh-DeWitt detector model for interactions with quantum fields. We then apply our model to li...
Published in Journal of High Energy Physics
When studying quantum field theories and lattice models, it is often useful to analytically continue the number of field or spin components from an integer to a real number. In spite of this, the precise meaning of such analytic continuations has never been fully clarified, and in particular the symmetry of these theories is obscure. We clarify the...
We compute the quantum tunneling rate of dilute axion stars close to the maximum mass [P.H. Chavanis, Phys. Rev. D {\bf 84}, 043531 (2011)] using the theory of instantons. We confirm that the lifetime of metastable states is extremely long, scaling as $t_{\rm life}\sim e^N\, t_D$ (except close to the critical point), where $N$ is the number of axio...
Published in Materials
A method to diagnose the deformation status of solid objects under loading is discussed. The present method is based on a recent field theory of deformation and fracture and optical interferometry known as the Electronic Speckle-Pattern Interferometry (ESPI). Using one of the most fundamental principles of physics referred to as symmetry in physics...
Some recent results showed that renormalization group can be considered as a promising framework to address open issues in data analysis. In this work, we focus on one of these aspects, closely related to principal component analysis for the case of large dimensional data sets with covariance having a nearly continuous spectrum. In this case, the d...
Published in Nordicom Review
By operationalising Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and positions of autonomy and heteronomy, and applying a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to data gathered from a large content analysis, the article explores the relations between online newspapers and their corresponding print or broadcast versions within a constructed Danish “fie...
