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Panda, Sukanta

Publications and source records attributed to Panda, Sukanta.

Anisotropic universe with anisotropic sources

We analyze the state space of a Bianchi-I universe with anisotropic sources. Here we consider an extended state space which includes null geodesics in this background. The evolution equations for all the state observables are derived. Dynamical systems approach is used to study the evolution of these equations. The asymptotic stable fixed points for all the evolution equations are found. We also check our analytic results with numerical analysis of these dynamical equations. The evolution of the state observables are studied both in cosmic time and using a dimensionless time variable. Then we repeat the same analysis with a more realistic scenario, adding the isotropic (dust like dark) matter and a cosmological constant (dark energy) to our anisotropic sources, to study their co-evolution. The universe now approaches a de Sitter space asymptotically dominated by the cosmological constant. The cosmic microwave background anisotropy maps due to shear are also generated in this scenario, assuming that the universe contains anisotropic matter along with the usual (dark) matter and vacuum (dark) energy since decoupling. We find that they contribute dominantly to the CMB quadrupole. We also constrain the current level of anisotropy and also search for any cosmic preferred axis present in the data. We use the Union 2 Supernovae data to this extent. An anisotropy axis close to the mirror symmetry axis seen in the cosmic microwave background data from Planck probe is found.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Direction dependence of the power spectrum and its effect on the cosmic microwave background radiation

We study several anisotropic inflationary models and their implications for the observed violation of statistical isotropy in the CMBR data. In two of these models the anisotropy decays very quickly during the inflationary phase of expansion. We explicitly show that these models lead to violation of isotropy only for low l CMBR modes. Our primary aim is to fit the observed alignment of l = 2,3 multipoles to the theoretical models. We use two measures, based on the power tensor, which contains information about the alignment of each multipole, to quantify the anisotropy in data. One of the measures uses the dispersion in eigenvalues of the power tensor. We also define another measure which tests the overall correlation between two different multipoles. We perturbatively compute these measures of anisotropy and fix the theoretical parameters by making a best fit to l = 2,3 multipoles. We show that some of the models studied are able to consistently explain the observed violation of statistical isotropy.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Testing unimodular gravity

We consider models of gravitation that are based on unimodular general coordinate transformations (GCT). These transformations include only those which do not change the determinant of the metric. We treat the determinant as a separate field which transforms as a scalar under unimodular GCT. We consider a class of such theories. In general, these theories do not transform covariantly under the full GCT. We characterize the violation of general coordinate invariance by introducing a new parameter. We show that the theory is consistent with observations for a wide range of this parameter. This parameter may serve as a test for possible violations of general coordinate invariance. We also consider the cosmic evolution within the framework of these models. We show that in general we do not obtain consistent cosmological solutions if we assume the standard cosmological constant or the standard form of non-relativistic matter. We propose a suitable generalization which is consistent with cosmology. We fit the resulting model to the high redshift supernova data. We find that we can obtain a good fit to this data even if include only a single component, either cosmological constant or non-relativistic matter.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗