The right-hand side of the slow-roll curvature power spectrum must be evaluated separately for each mode at cosmological horizon exit, . Taking logarithms gives
For ,
Hence
This is the scalar spectral index in Hubble slow-roll parameters.
The creation and annihilation operators obey the canonical bosonic commutation relations
Since , the vacuum two-point correlation function is
For
one has . Comparison with the definition of the dimensionless power spectrum gives
where . On superhorizon scales, or , and therefore
Yes. A perturbation of amplitude at CMB decoupling must grow by at least before becoming nonlinear. During matter domination , but once dominates, the suppression of matter growth by smooth accelerated expansion makes the growth approach a finite limit. Increasing moves this freeze-out to an earlier scale factor and eventually prevents from reaching unity.
For an order-of-magnitude bound, matter growth would reach unity at
Requiring matter still to dominate then gives the galaxy-formation bound on the cosmological constant
The exact upper limit follows by imposing with the integral growth factor and an appropriate nonlinear-collapse threshold.
For matter plus a cosmological constant,
Set . Substitution into the equation from part (c) makes the coefficient of vanish by the Friedmann relation and leaves
or
Therefore the two independent modes can be written
The first is the decaying mode. Normalizing the second to at early times gives the integral linear growth factor in a matter-Lambda universe
Use . Then
where now . Also
Substitution into part (a) and division by gives the matter growth equation as a function of scale factor
During matter domination, and . Trying gives
whose roots are and . Thus the cosmic-time matter density modes are
During asymptotic cosmological constant energy domination, is constant and is negligible, so
The matter density modes during cosmological-constant domination are therefore
The growing matter-era solution freezes to a constant.
During matter domination, pressureless matter has . On subhorizon scales the time derivative of the Newtonian gauge in cosmology potential is negligible, so the continuity and Euler equations reduce to
Taking the divergence of the second equation, differentiating the first, and using the Poisson equation gives
Since , one has
Division by yields the standard linear cosmological density perturbation equation
The measurement cannot definitively exclude the model. If only Standard Model particles supplied entropy at scalar decoupling, the largest available value would give
which a measurement around the Standard Model value would clearly detect.
In the proposed model, however, the many additional relativistic species are also in equilibrium when the scalar decouples. They increase , and their later disappearance transfers entropy to the coupled bath but not to the scalar. Since , a sufficiently large hidden particle content can dilute the scalar signal below any stated finite precision; a value above roughly already pushes it below about . The null measurement constrains the combination of decoupling time and total entropy degrees of freedom, but does not rule out the entire new-physics model.
After the real scalar decouples at , its temperature redshifts as . The other particles continue sharing entropy. Just before standard-neutrino decoupling their entropy degrees of freedom are
The temperature of a decoupled relativistic relic therefore obeys
A real scalar has one bosonic degree of freedom, whereas one effective neutrino species has energy weight . Hence the contribution of a decoupled real scalar to Neff is
Here counts the other particles still coupled to the thermal bath, as specified in the question.
Photons are bosons with two polarizations and temperature , so . Each relativistic neutrino species includes a neutrino and antineutrino helicity state, is fermionic, and has temperature . Consequently
Adding the two contributions gives the defining expression for the effective number of neutrino species:
Before electron-positron annihilation, photons, electrons, and positrons share one temperature. Their effective entropy degrees of freedom are
The neutrinos have already undergone thermal decoupling in cosmology, so remains constant and they receive none of the electron-positron entropy. In the still-coupled electromagnetic plasma, cosmological entropy conservation gives
The decoupled neutrino temperature at the same later time is . Dividing the two relations gives the Cosmic neutrino background temperature
This instantaneous-decoupling calculation neglects the small reheating correction from non-instantaneous neutrino decoupling.
All galaxies in the population share the same formation time , so the difference between their stellar ages equals the difference between their cosmic emission times. The redshift-time relation gives
For a close pair with ,
A cosmic chronometer measurement therefore reconstructs directly from differential galaxy ages. Inserting those values into the matter-plus-dark-energy Friedmann expression constrains .
Supernova distances integrate , while already contains an integral of . Cosmic chronometers avoid the distance integral, so rapid oscillations in suffer one fewer smoothing operation and can leave a more visible signal.
The flux relation is with luminosity distance . In a spatially flat universe,
Thus Type Ia supernova cosmology measures the distance-redshift curve. Equation (2) makes depend on an integral of , while introduces a second integral. Fitting predicted distances to many supernova fluxes over a range of redshifts therefore constrains parameters or bins describing , although these integrations smooth fine redshift structure.
The common luminosity need not be known to constrain the shape of . An unknown multiplies every inferred distance by the same factor and is degenerate with the overall scale , or equivalently with the supernova absolute magnitude. Relative distances at different redshifts still determine the shape of the expansion history. An external calibration is needed to determine the absolute distance scale.
For dynamical dark energy, use in the continuity equation to obtain
Therefore the variable dark-energy equation of state gives
Combining this with in the Friedmann equation yields
where
This is the Hubble parameter for matter and dynamical dark energy.
For a component with and constant , the cosmological perfect-fluid continuity equation becomes
Integration gives the constant-equation-of-state density scaling
Define the present cosmological density parameter by
Substitution into the spatially flat Friedmann equation gives the Hubble parameter for constant-equation-of-state components
Spatial flatness is what allows the expression to contain only the listed density components, with .
The curvature 2-forms show that orthonormal curvature components grow as . The geodesic deviation equation converts them into the relative acceleration of nearby parts of an observer. As , the Schwarzschild tidal force stretches radial separations and compresses transverse separations with unbounded magnitude. An extended body therefore undergoes destructive tidal deformation before reaching the Schwarzschild singularity.
Substituting the forms from part (b) into Cartan's second structure equation gives the independent mixed-index curvature 2-forms
Every form is proportional to its corresponding basis 2-form, so the curvature operator is diagonal. The diagonal Ricci tensor components are contractions of these sectional curvature coefficients. In each case the coefficients cancel in the pattern , with the Lorentzian sign included when the time direction is contracted. Hence
This is consistent with Schwarzschild spacetime being a vacuum solution away from .
Write
For a diagonal curvature operator, contains only . Consequently can be nonzero only when the plane indexed by is the same as the plane indexed by . In the contraction
this condition cannot hold for . Therefore
which is the statement that a diagonal curvature operator implies diagonal Ricci tensor.
Set
Direct exterior differentiation gives
Solving Cartan's first structure equation and imposing gives the independent mixed-index connection 1-forms
The remaining forms follow from Lorentz-signature antisymmetry: , , , and for spatial indices.
Let . The proposed coframe gives
which expands to the stated metric. Hence it is the orthonormal coframe in Painlevé–Gullstrand coordinates with signature .

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact