Evolution of cosmological perturbations in braneworld universes

TL;DR

This thesis investigates how scalar and tensor cosmological perturbations evolve in a Randall-Sundrum braneworld, accounting for brane-bulk interactions, dissipation, and nonlocal effects, with applications to CMB lensing reconstruction.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of perturbation evolution in braneworld cosmology, including effective propagator calculations and a real-space method for CMB lensing analysis, highlighting dissipation and nonlocality effects.

Findings

Computed effective brane propagator including bulk backreaction

Quantified dissipation rates of matter and graviton modes

Developed a real-space estimator for CMB lensing fields

Abstract

In this thesis we mainly explore the evolution of both scalar and tensor cosmological perturbations in a Randall-Sundrum braneworld having an arbitrary expansion history. We adopt a four-dimensional perspective in which the localized degrees of freedom on the brane are regarded as an open quantum system coupled to the large environment composed of the Anti-de Sitter ($AdS$) bulk gravitons. Due to the non-uniform expansion of the universe, the brane degrees of freedom and the bulk degrees of freedom interact as they propagate forward in time, leading to an effective dissipation as well as a nonlocality from the four-dimensional point of view of an observer on the brane. Using both the "bare" retarded propagator on the brane and the retarded propagator in the bulk, we compute the effective propagator on the brane for the "dressed" brane modes by resumming the bulk backreaction effects at all order in the brane-bulk coupling. Dissipation and nonlocality are encoded into the effective brane propagator. We find the dissipation rates of various matter perturbations on the brane as well as of the graviton bound state. Next we present an explicit calculation of the covariant retarded Green function for the graviton in $AdS$ space. In the last part, we investigate the reconstruction of CMB lensing in standard cosmology. We construct a statistical estimator of the gravitational lensing dilatation and shear fields directly in real space. The real space method developed here is useful for analysing realistic CMB maps containing a galactic cut and possibly numerous small excisions to exclude point sources that cannot be reliably subtracted.