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Jain, Pankaj

Publications and source records attributed to Jain, Pankaj.

Dipole modulation of cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization

We propose a dipole modulation model for the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) polarization field. We show that the model leads to correlations between l and l+1 multipoles, exactly as in the case of temperature. We obtain results for the case of TE, EE and BB correlations. An anisotropic or inhomogeneous model of primordial power spectrum which leads to such correlations in temperature field also predicts similar correlations in CMBR polarization. We analyze the CMBR temperature and polarization data in order to extract the signal of these correlation between l and l+1 multipoles. Our results for the case of temperature using the latest PLANCK data agree with those obtained by an earlier analysis. A detailed study of the correlation in the polarization data is not possible at present. Hence we restrict ourselves to a preliminary investigation in this case.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Effect of VSR invariant Chern-Simons Lagrangian on photon polarization

We propose a generalization of the Chern-Simons (CS) Lagrangian which is invariant under the SIM(2) transformations but not under the full Lorentz group. The generalized lagrangian is also invariant under a SIM(2) gauge transformation. We study the effect of such a term on radiation propagating over cosmological distances. We find that the dominant effect of this term is to produce circular polarization as radiation propagates through space. We use the circular polarization data from distant radio sources in order to impose a limit on this term.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Testing the dipole modulation model in CMBR

The hemispherical power asymmetry, observed in the CMBR data, has generally been interpreted in terms of the dipole modulation model for the temperature fluctuations. Here we point out that this model leads to several predictions, which can be directly tested in the current data. We suggest tests of the hemispherical power asymmetry both in real and multipole space. We find a significant signal of the dipole modulation model in WMAP and PLANCK data with our tests. The dipole amplitude and direction also agrees, within errors, with earlier results based on hemispherical analysis in multipole space. We also find evidence that the effective dipole modulation amplitude increases with the multipole l in the range l = 2−64.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Direction dependence of the power spectrum and its effect on the cosmic microwave background radiation

We study several anisotropic inflationary models and their implications for the observed violation of statistical isotropy in the CMBR data. In two of these models the anisotropy decays very quickly during the inflationary phase of expansion. We explicitly show that these models lead to violation of isotropy only for low l CMBR modes. Our primary aim is to fit the observed alignment of l = 2,3 multipoles to the theoretical models. We use two measures, based on the power tensor, which contains information about the alignment of each multipole, to quantify the anisotropy in data. One of the measures uses the dispersion in eigenvalues of the power tensor. We also define another measure which tests the overall correlation between two different multipoles. We perturbatively compute these measures of anisotropy and fix the theoretical parameters by making a best fit to l = 2,3 multipoles. We show that some of the models studied are able to consistently explain the observed violation of statistical isotropy.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Cosmological implications of unimodular gravity

We consider a model of gravity and matter fields which is invariant only under unimodular general coordinate transformations (GCT). The determinant of the metric is treated as a separate field which transforms as a scalar under unimodular GCT. Furthermore we also demand that the theory is invariant under a new global symmetry which we call generalized conformal invariance. We study the cosmological implications of the resulting theory. We show that this theory gives a fit to the high-z supernova data which is identical to the standard Big Bang model. Hence we require some other cosmological observations to test the validity of this model. We also consider some models which do not obey the generalized conformal invariance. In these models we can fit the supernova data without introducing the standard cosmological constant term. Furthermore these models introduce only one dark component and hence solve the coincidence problem of dark matter and dark energy.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Testing unimodular gravity

We consider models of gravitation that are based on unimodular general coordinate transformations (GCT). These transformations include only those which do not change the determinant of the metric. We treat the determinant as a separate field which transforms as a scalar under unimodular GCT. We consider a class of such theories. In general, these theories do not transform covariantly under the full GCT. We characterize the violation of general coordinate invariance by introducing a new parameter. We show that the theory is consistent with observations for a wide range of this parameter. This parameter may serve as a test for possible violations of general coordinate invariance. We also consider the cosmic evolution within the framework of these models. We show that in general we do not obtain consistent cosmological solutions if we assume the standard cosmological constant or the standard form of non-relativistic matter. We propose a suitable generalization which is consistent with cosmology. We fit the resulting model to the high redshift supernova data. We find that we can obtain a good fit to this data even if include only a single component, either cosmological constant or non-relativistic matter.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗