Effect of the Cubic Torus Topology on Cosmological Perturbations

We study the effect of the cubic torus topology of the Universe on scalar cosmological perturbations which define the gravitational potential. We obtain three alternative forms of the solution for both the gravitational potential produced by point-like masses, and the corresponding force. The first solution includes the expansion of delta-functions into Fourier series, exploiting periodic boundary conditions. The second one is composed of summed solutions of the Helmholtz equation for the original mass and its images. Each of these summed solutions is the Yukawa potential. In the third formula, we express the Yukawa potentials via Ewald sums. We show that for the present Universe, both the bare summation of Yukawa potentials and the Yukawa-Ewald sums require smaller numbers of terms to yield the numerical values of the potential and the force up to desired accuracy. Nevertheless, the Yukawa formula is yet preferable owing to its much simpler structure.

Cosmology

Starting with the assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy, the cosmological solutions of the Einstein field equations—the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker metrics—are derived. After a discussion of constant curvature metrics and the topology of the Universe, the chapter moves on to discuss observational implications: expansion of the Universe, cosmological red shift, primordial nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, and primordial perturbations. The chapter includes a brief discussion of de Sitter and anti-de Sitter space and an introduction to inflation.

Signature of Topology of the Universe

The main motivation to write this article is to relate the cosmology and topology in order to gain some insight into the topological signatures of the Standard model of Universe. The theory of General Relativity as given by Einstein only describes the local geometry of space but not global, hence leaves the possibility to explore the topology of the space (simply- or multi-connected). By expressing the cosmological model in trms of energy density parameters, we attempt to understand the geometry of spacetime. This is followed by a discussion on the possibility to detect the signatures of topology of space imprinted on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).

Detectability of Torus Topology

The global shape, or topology, of the universe is not constrained by the equations of General Relativity, which only describe the local universe. As a consequence, the boundaries of space are not fixed and topologies different from the trivial infinite Euclidean space are possible. The cosmic microwave background (CMB) is the most efficient tool to study topology and test alternative models. Multi-connected topologies, such as the 3-torus, are of great interest because they are anisotropic and allow us to test a possible violation of isotropy in CMB data. We show that the correlation function of the coefficients of the expansion of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in spherical harmonics encodes a topological signature. This signature can be used to distinguish an infinite space from a multi-connected space on sizes larger than the diameter of the last scattering surface (DLSS). With the help of the Kullback-Leibler divergence, we set the size of the edge of the biggest distinguishable torus with CMB temperature fluctuations and E-modes of polarization to 1.15 DLSS. CMB temperature fluctuations allow us to detect universes bigger than the observable universe, whereas E-modes are efficient to detect universes smaller than the observable universe.