Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 158-163).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-139). Also available on microfiche.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-104).

No description available.

We consider a novel extension of the recently proposed mimetic gravity. The latter is a scalar-tensor theory which is able to describe dark matter on cosmological scales. Moreover, this theory can be considered as a low energy limit of the projectable Horava-Lifshitz gravity. The proposed novel extension directly couples gradients of the mimetic scalar field to the curvature tensor. These couplings introduce into the energy momentum tensor an anisotropic stress which is non-vanishing even at the first order in perturbations around a cosmological background. Further we show that such terms modify the formula for the speed of sound of scalar perturbations and even more importantly change the speed of propagation for the gravitational waves. The appearance of the anisotropic stress and the consequent nontrivial speed of propagation of the gravity waves are new phenomena which were not present in the previously studied mimetic models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the effective Newton's gravitational constant in the background Friedmann equations is shifted in the presence of the novel couplings of the mimetic scalar field. We calculate the quadratic action for scalar and tensor perturbations and briefly discuss possible instabilities. Finally we consider the current observational bounds on the model....

English abstract The thesis is devoted to the interpretation of gravity data in granite intrusions of Moldanubian Pluton near Kaplice. This research was based on gravimetric field measurements taken on two parallel profiles in April 2016. Data from the profiles were then processed and geologically interpreted. Evaluate of derived gravity data showed that the positions of increased gravity field gradient roughly correspond to mapped geological interface. Individual rock types can therefore be distinguished using gravimetry.

Gauge/gravity duality is an important tool for learning about strongly coupled gauge theories. This thesis explores a set of examples of this duality in which the field theories have SU(2|4) supersymmetry and discrete sets of vacuum solutions. Specifically, we use the duality to propose Lagrangian definitions of type IIA Little String Theory on S⁵ as double-scaling limits of the Plane-Wave Matrix Model, maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on R x S² and N=4 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on R×S³/Zk. We find the supergravity solutions dual to generic vacua of the Plane-Wave Matrix Model and maximally supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on R×S². We use the supergravity duals to calculate new instanton amplitudes for the Plane-Wave Matrix Model at strong coupling. Finally, we study a natural coarse-graining of the vacua, and find that the associated geometries are singular. We define an entropy functional that vanishes for regular geometries, is non-zero for singular geometries, and is maximized by the thermal state. / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

This work is concerned with how to extract information encoded in small scales of non-Gaussian fields, with the purpose of learning about cosmology using weak gravitational lensing. We do so by comparing different methods on simulated data sets. The topic is relevant, for upcoming galaxy surveys will map the late evolution of the matter density field, which is non-Gaussian, with an unprecedented level of detail, and any improvement on the analysis techniques will increase the experiments' scientific return. First, we investigate some non-Gaussian observables used in the weak lensing community. We analyze to what extent they are sensitive to the background expansion of the universe, and to what extent to the evolution of the structures responsible for the lensing. We then focus our attention on one such statistic, lensing peaks, and assess the performance of a simple halo-based model that has been proposed to forecast their abundance. We find some shortcomings of that semi-analytic approach, and proceed to review some minimal requirements for numerical simulations used to forecast non-Gaussian statistics, to reduce their computational cost while fulfilling the accuracy and precision required by future experiments. Second, we propose a novel measurement, that of the temperature dipole induced on the cosmic microwave background induced by the rotation of ionized gas around galaxies, as an additional observation to help constrain the distribution of baryonic matter on the smallest scales probed by WL experiments. The uncertainty in this distribution is a major theoretical systematic for future surveys. Third, we show how deep neural networks can be used to map pixel-level data into the cosmological parameters of interest, by-passing the previous compression step of measuring pre-designed statistics. We provide the first (simulation-based) credible contours based on neural networks applied to weak lensing data, and discuss how to interpret these models.