Dietrich Bodeker, Florian Kuhnel, Isabel M. Oldengott, Dominik J. Schwarz

We study the influence of lepton flavour asymmetries on the formation and the mass spectrum of primordial black holes. We estimate the detectability of their mergers with LIGO/Virgo and show that the currently published gravitational wave events may actually be described by a primordial black hole spectrum from non-zero asymmetries. We suggest to use gravitational-wave astronomy as a novel tool to probe how lepton flavour asymmetric the Universe has been before the onset of neutrino oscillations.

E.V. Arbuzova, A.D. Dolgov, L. A. Panasenko

Equation describing propagation of gravitational waves (GW) over arbitrary curved space-time background is analyzed. A new term, which is absent in the conventional homogeneous and isotropic Friedmann cosmology, is found. Some examples of realistic metric, where this new term manifests itself, are presented. Possible implications to very low frequency GW are briefly discussed.

Pavel Jiroušek, Keigo Shimada, Alexander Vikman, Masahide Yamaguchi

We show that promoting the trace part of the Einstein equations to a trivial identity results in the Newton constant being an integration constant. Thus, in this formulation the Newton constant is a global dynamical degree of freedom which is also a subject to quantization and quantum fluctuations. This is similar to what happens to the cosmological constant in the unimodular gravity where the trace part of the Einstein equations is lost in a different way. We introduce a constrained variational formulation of these modified Einstein equations. Then, drawing on analogies with the Henneaux- Teitelboim action for unimodular gravity, we construct different general-covariant actions resulting in these dynamics. The inverse of dynamical Newton constant is canonically conjugated to the Ricci scalar integrated over spacetime. Surprisingly, instead of the dynamical Newton constant one can formulate an equivalent theory with a dynamical Planck constant. Finally, we show that an axion-like field can play a role of the Newton constant or the Planck constant.

Boryana Hadzhiyska, Sandro Tacchella, Sownak Bose, Daniel J. Eisenstein

We employ the hydrodynamical simulation IllustrisTNG-300-1 to explore the halo occupation distribution (HOD) and environmental dependence of luminous star-forming emission-line galaxies (ELGs) at $z \sim 1$. Such galaxies are key targets for current and upcoming cosmological surveys. We select model galaxies through cuts in color-color space allowing for a direct comparison with the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) surveys and then compare them with galaxies selected based on star-formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass. We demonstrate that the ELG populations are twice more likely to reside in lower-density regions (sheets) compared with the mass-selected populations and twice less likely to occupy the densest regions of the cosmic web (knots). We also show that the color-selected and SFR-selected ELGs exhibit very similar occupation and clustering statistics, finding that the agreement is best for lower redshifts. In contrast with the mass-selected sample, the occupation of halos by a central ELG peaks at $\sim$20\%. We furthermore explore the dependence of the HOD and the auto-correlation on environment, noticing that at fixed halo mass, galaxies in high-density regions cluster about 10 times more strongly than low-density ones. This result suggests that we should model carefully the galaxy-halo relation and implement assembly bias effects into our models (estimated at $\sim$4\% of the clustering of the DESI color-selected sample at $z = 0.8$). Finally, we apply a simple mock recipe to recover the clustering on large scales ($r \gtrsim 1 \ {\rm Mpc}/h$) to within 1\% by augmenting the HOD model with an environment dependence, demonstrating the power of adopting flexible population models.