PROJEKTI
   

Project
Acronym: MONOVERSE 
Name: Monoverse - an inhomogeneous model of the Universe 
Project status: From: 2014-06-01 To: 2016-08-31 (Completed)
Contract number: NEWFELPRO Grant Agreement No. 27 
Action line:  
Type (Programme): FP7 
Funding scheme: Marie Curie 
Project cost: 139.076,88 EUR
Project funding: 139.076,88 EUR
Project coordinator
Organisation Name: Utrecht University, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Faculty of Physics and Astronomy 
Organisation adress: Leuvenlaan 4, Utrecht 
Organisation country: Nizozemska 
Contact person name: prof. dr. sc. Tomislav Prokopec 
Contact person email: Email 
Croatian partner
Organisation name: Fakultet elektrotehnike i računarstva 
Organisation address: Unska 3, 10000 Zagreb, Hrvatska 
Contact person name: dr. sc. Anja Marunović
Contact person tel:
  Contact person fax:  
Contact person e-mail:  
Partners
Organisation nameCountry
Short description of project
The Standard Cosmological Model – or the Lambda-CDM – has been highly successful in explaining astronomical observations, and yet recent observations have caused troubling clefts in the Model. In particular, large angular scale cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuations and some large scale structure data suggest that the Lambda-CDM model is incomplete. At this moment there are no theoretical models that can successfully explain the data. In this proposal we will investigate cosmological models rectified by global monopoles and test them against the current data. There are strong indications that such models can explain many of the observed large angular scale CMB anomalies. An important ingredient of these models is that they provide a natural mechanism for violation of spatial homogeneity or isotropy and, moreover, they strengthen non-Gaussianities in the way suggested by the observations.  
Short description of the task performed by Croatian partner
In the last 20 years cosmology has enjoyed an unprecedented flood of new data, which has ultimately allowed cosmologists to develop a theoretical model of the Universe, based on which we have acquired deep insights into the Universe’s past, its current state and, possibly, its fate. On the largest observable scales the Universe appears highly homogeneous, but it is very inhomogeneous on small scales on which galaxies and clusters of galaxies form. These phenomena provide a plethora of information for building a standard cosmological model with the goal to accurately model the Universe’s dynamics on all scales. While the building stones of contemporary cosmology are based on the standard model of elementary particles and interactions flanked by Einstein’s classical gravity, modern astronomical observations suggest that the standard cosmological model has to be supplied with at least two additional ingredients: nonbaryonic cold dark matter (CDM) and dark energy which is well modeled by a cosmological constant Lambda. When these two ingredients are added to standard (baryonic) matter, one gets the standard cosmological model, also known as the Lambda-CDM. The efforts towards building the standard cosmological model have been awarded with three Nobel prizes for physics: one for the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), one for the discovery of temperature fluctuations in the CMB, and one for the discovery of the dark energy of the Universe.   Even though the Lambda-CDM has been a great success in explaining a large conglomerate of data, some recent data point at potential problems, which include small violation of spatial isotropy and homogeneity. Spatial anisotropy is encoded in the CMB spectrum in virtue of various large and small scale anomalies (lack of power on large angular scales, large cold spot, parity violating effects, just to name a few). Furthermore, some aspects of the observed large scale structure of the Universe cannot be reconciled with N-body simulations based on the Lambda-CDM (the excess in small satellites, large velocities in the Bullet cluster collision, large dark flows, etc.). The main purpose of this proposal is to construct and investigate novel theoretical models which could fix (some of) the problematic aspects of the Lambda-CDM model. More specifically, we intend to focus on the models with global and local (gauged) monopoles which provide a natural way for breaking spatial homogeneity and isotropy.  


   

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