Plausible double inflation
It is likely that extended inflation is followed by an epoch of slowroll inflation. Such a sequence of events may lead to a very interesting perturbation spectrum with significant power on the scale of the transition between the extended and slowroll phase, superimposed upon a power-law spectrum with deviations from the Harrison-Zel'dovich slope. Normalization of the spectra above and below the transition scale is expected to differ.

title: Dark Energy Constraints from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
abstract: Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) in the galaxy power spectrum allow us to extract the scale of the comoving sound horizon at recombination, a cosmological standard ruler accurately determined by the cosmic microwave background anisotropy data. We examine various issues important in the use of BAOs to probe dark energy. We find that if we assume a flat universe and priors on ?m, ?mh2, and ?bh2 as expected from the Planck mission, the constraints on dark energy parameters (w0, w') scale much less steeply with survey area than (area)-1/2 for a given redshift range. The constraints on the dark energy density ?X(z), however, do scale roughly with (area)-1/2 due to the strong correlation between H(z) and ?m (which reduces the effect of priors on ?m). Dark energy constraints from BAOs are very sensitive to the assumed linear scale of matter clustering and the redshift accuracy of the survey. For a BAO survey with 0.5 ? z ? 2, ? (R) = 0.4 [corresponding to kmax (z = 0) = 0.086 h Mpc-1], and ?z/ (1 + z) = 0.001, we find = (0.115,0.183) and (0.069, 0.104) for survey areas of 1000 and 10,000 deg2, respectively. We find that it is critical to minimize the bias in the scale estimates in order to derive reliable dark energy constraints. For a 1000 (10,000) deg2 BAO survey, a 1 ? bias in ln H (z) leads to a 2 ? (3 ?) bias in w'. The bias in w' due to the same scale bias from ln DA (z) is slightly smaller and opposite in sign. The results from this paper will be useful in assessing different proposed BAO surveys and guiding the design of optimal dark energy detection strategies.

title: Wavelets and WMAP non-Gaussianity
abstract: We study the statistical properties of the first-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data on different scales using the spherical Mexican hat wavelet transform. Consistent with the 2004 results of Vielva et al., we find a deviation from Gaussianity in the form of kurtosis of wavelet coefficients on 3-4 scales in the southern Galactic hemisphere. This paper extends the work of Vielva et al. as follows: We find that the non-Gaussian signal shows up more strongly in the form of a larger than expected number of cold pixels and also in the form of scale-scale correlations among wavelet coefficients. We establish the robustness of the non-Gaussian signal under more wide-ranging assumptions regarding the Galactic mask applied to the data and the noise statistics. This signal is unlikely to be due to the usual quadratic term parameterized by the nonlinearity parameter fNL. We use the skewness of the spherical Mexican hat wavelet coefficients to constrain fNL with the first-year WMAP data. Our results constrain fNL to be 50+/-80 at 68% confidence and less than 280 at 99% confidence.

title: Dark Energy Search with Supernovae
abstract: To determine the nature of dark energy from observational data, it is important that we use model-independent and optimal methods. We should probe dark energy using its density (allowed to be a free function of cosmic time) instead of its equation of state. We should minimize gravitational lensing effect on supernovae by flux-averaging. We need to include complementary data (for example, from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large scale structure (LSS)) in a consistent manner to help break the degeneracy between the dark energy density and the matter density fraction. We should push for ambitious future supernova surveys that can observe a large number of supernovae at the highest possible redshifts. I discuss these and other issues that will be important in our quest to unravel the mystery of the nature of dark energy. Current supernova, CMB, and LSS data already rule out dark energy models with dark energy densities that vary greatly with time; with the cosmological constant model providing an excellent fit to the data. A precise measurement of dark energy density as a free function of cosmic time will have a fundamental impact on particle physics and cosmology.

title: Constraints on generalized extended inflationary models.
abstract: We study the physical constraints on generalized extended inflationary theories, in which the Brans-Dicke field {Phi} couples to the inflaton sector in the form of two arbitrary power-law functions of {Phi}. We find that the most stringent constraints arise from the need to suppress large bubbles and from considerations of the density perturbations generated during extended inflation. We find that there are sizable portions of the parameter spaces in which all the constraints are satisfied.

title: A robust distance measurement and dark energy constraints from the spherically averaged correlation function of Sloan Digital Sky Survey luminous red Galaxies
abstract: We measure the effective distance to z = 0.26, DV (0.26), and mh 2 from the overall shape of the spherically-averaged two-point correlati on function of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 (DR7) volume-limited luminous red galaxy (LRG) sample, without assuming a dark energy model or a flat Universe. We giv e the mean and covariance matrix of DV (0.26), mh 2 , bh 2 , and ns. We show that these provide an efficient and accurate summary of the volume-limited LRG data. With flat priors on bh 2 and ns (7σWMAP7), we find mh 2 = 0.131 ± 0.020, and rs/DV (0.26) = 0.1466 +0.0068 0.0073 (the ratio of the sound horizon at the drag epoch to the effective distance to z = 0.26). We find that measurements of mh 2 or m are biased low if flux-limited (instead of volume-limited) L RG sample is used. By scaling the spherically-averaged correlation fun ction, we find the Hubble parameter H(0.26) = 79 +12 13 km s 1 Mpc 1 and the angular diameter distance DA(0.26) = 848 +86 88 Mpc. Combining our results with the cosmic microwave background and supernova data, we obtain k = 0.0059 +0.0092 0.0093 andw = 1.023 +0.054 0.053 (assuming a constant dark energy equation of state). We use LasDamas SDSS mock catalogs to compute the covariance matrix of the correlation function, and investigate the use of lognormal catal ogs as an alternative. We find that the input correlation function can be accurately recovered from lognormal catalogs, although they give larger errors on all scales (especially on small sc ales) compared to the mock catalogs derived from cosmological N-body simulations.

title: Infrared–red cores in nearby elliptical galaxies
abstract: We present the Spitzer Space Telescope Infrared Array Camera observations for a sample of local elliptical galaxies to study later stages of active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity. A sample of 36 elliptical galaxies is selected from the Palomar spectroscopic survey. We detect nuclear non-stellar infrared emission in nine of them. There is unambiguous evidence of circumnuclear dust in these nine galaxies in their optical images. We also find a remarkable correlation between the infrared excess emission and the nuclear radio/X-ray emission, suggesting that infrared excess emission is tightly related to nuclear activity. The possible origin of infrared excess emission from hot dust heated by the central AGN is supported by the spectral indices of the infrared excess emission.

title: Measuring cosmogenic 9Li background in a reactor neutrino experiment
abstract: Cosmogenic isotopes Li-9 and He-8 produced in the detector are the most problematic background in the reactor neutrino experiments designed to determine precisely the neutrino mixing angle theta(13). The average time interval of cosmic-ray muons in the detector is often on the order of the lifetimes of the Li-9 and He-8 isotopes. We have developed a method for determining this kind of background from the distribution of time since last muon for muon rate up to about 20 Hz when the background-to-signal ratio is small, on the order of a few percents.

title: Predicting neutron production from cosmic-ray muons
abstract: Fast neutrons from cosmic-ray muons are an important background to underground low-energy experiments. The estimate of such a background is often hampered by the difficulty of measuring and calculating neutron production with sufficient accuracy. Indeed substantial disagreement exists between the different analytical calculations performed so far, while data reported by different experiments are not always consistent. We discuss a new unified approach to estimate the neutron yield, the energy spectrum, the multiplicity, and the angular distribution from cosmic muons using the Monte Carlo simulation package FLUKA and show that it gives a good description of most of the existing measurements once the appropriate corrections have been applied.

title: Multi-stream inflation
abstract: We propose a ``multi-stream'' inflation model, which is a double field model with spontaneous breaking and restoration of an approximate symmetry. We calculate the density perturbation and non-Gaussianity in this model. We find that this model can have large, scale dependent, and probably oscillating non-Gaussianity. We also note that our model can produce features in the CMB power spectrum and hemispherical power asymmetry.

title: Generalized space-time noncommutative inflation
abstract: We study the noncommutative inflation with a time-dependent noncommutativity between space and time. From the numerical analysis of power law inflation, there are clues that the CMB spectrum indicates a nonconstant noncommutative inflation. Then we extend our treatment to the inflation models with more general noncommutativity and find that the scalar perturbation power spectrum depends sensitively on the time varying of the spacetime noncommutativity. This stringy effect may be probed in the future cosmological observations.