International Center for Quantum-field Measurement Systems for Studies of the Universe and Particles

Abstract LiteBIRD, the Lite (Light) satellite for the study of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection, is a space mission for primordial cosmology and fundamental physics. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) selected LiteBIRD in May 2019 as a strategic large-class (L-class) mission, with an expected launch in the late 2020s using JAXA’s H3 rocket. LiteBIRD is planned to orbit the Sun–Earth Lagrangian point L2, where it will map the cosmic microwave background polarization over the entire sky for three years, with three telescopes in 15 frequency bands between 34 and 448 GHz, to achieve an unprecedented total sensitivity of $2.2\, \mu$K-arcmin, with a typical angular resolution of 0.5○ at 100 GHz. The primary scientific objective of LiteBIRD is to search for the signal from cosmic inflation, either making a discovery or ruling out well-motivated inflationary models. The measurements of LiteBIRD will also provide us with insight into the quantum nature of gravity and other new physics beyond the standard models of particle physics and cosmology. We provide an overview of the LiteBIRD project, including scientific objectives, mission and system requirements, operation concept, spacecraft and payload module design, expected scientific outcomes, potential design extensions, and synergies with other projects.

Abstract Primordial non-Gaussianity encodes vital information of the physics of the early universe, particularly during the inflationary epoch. To explore the local-type primordial non-Gaussianity f NL , we study the anisotropies in gravitational wave background induced by the linear cosmological scalar perturbations during radiation domination in the early universe. We provide the first complete analysis to the angular power spectrum of such scalar-induced gravitational waves. The spectrum is expressed in terms of the initial inhomogeneities, the Sachs-Wolfe effect, and their crossing. It is anticipated to have frequency dependence and multipole dependence, i.e., C ℓ ( ν ) ∝ [ ℓ ( ℓ +1)] -1 with ν being a frequency and ℓ referring to the ℓ -th spherical harmonic multipole. In particular, the initial inhomogeneites in this background depend on gravitational-wave frequency. These properties are potentially useful for the component separation, foreground removal, and breaking degeneracies in model parameters, making the non-Gaussian parameter f NL measurable. Further, theoretical expectations may be tested by space-borne gravitational-wave detectors in future.

The recent observations by pulsar timing array (PTA) experiments suggest the existence of stochastic gravitational wave background in the nano-Hz range. It can be a hint for the new physics and cosmic string is one of the promising candidates. In this paper, we study the implication of the PTA result for cosmic strings and dark photon dark matter produced by the decay of cosmic string loops. It can simultaneously explain the PTA result and present dark matter abundance for the dark photon mass m∼10−7–10−5eV. Implications for the gravitational wave detection with multi-frequency bands are also discussed.

In broad classes of inflationary models the period of accelerated expansion is followed by fragmentation of the inflaton scalar field into localized, long-lived, and massive oscillon excitations. We demonstrate that matter dominance of oscillons, followed by their rapid decay, significantly enhances the primordial gravitational wave (GW) spectrum. These oscillon-induced GWs, sourced by second-order perturbations, are distinct and could be orders of magnitude lower in frequency than the previously considered GWs associated with oscillon formation. We show that detectable oscillon-induced GW signatures establish direct tests independent from cosmic microwave background radiation for regions of parameter space of monodromy, and logarithmic and pure natural (plateau) potential classes of inflationary models, among others. We demonstrate that oscillon-induced GWs in a model based on pure natural inflation could be directly observable with the Einstein Telescope, Cosmic Explorer, and DECIGO. These signatures offer a new route for probing the underlying inflationary physics.

Abstract Detecting gravitational waves with frequencies higher than 10 kHz requires new strategies. In previous papers, we proposed magnon gravitational wave detectors and gave the first limit on gigahertz gravitational waves by reinterpreting the existing data from axion dark matter experiments. In this paper, we show that the sensitivity can be improved by constructing the detector specific to gravitational waves. In particular, we employ an infinite sum of terms in the expansion of Fermi normal coordinates to probe gravitational waves with a wavelength comparable to the detector size. As a consequence, we obtain sensitivity of around $$h_c \sim 10^{-20}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>h</mml:mi> <mml:mi>c</mml:mi> </mml:msub> <mml:mo>∼</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mn>20</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> .

Recently anomalous flux in the cosmic optical background (COB) is reported by the New Horizon observations. The COB flux is $16.37\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1.47\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{n}{\mathrm{Wm}}^{\ensuremath{-}2}\text{ }{\mathrm{sr}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, at the LORRI pivot wavelength of $0.608\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{\ensuremath{\mu}}\mathrm{m}$, which is $\ensuremath{\sim}4\ensuremath{\sigma}$ level above the expected flux from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) galaxy count. It would be great if this were a hint for the eV scale dark matter decaying into photons. In this paper, we point out that such a decaying dark matter model predicts a substantial amount of anisotropy in the COB flux, which is accurately measured by the HST. The data of the HST excludes the decay rate of the dominant cold dark matter larger than ${10}^{\ensuremath{-}24}--{10}^{\ensuremath{-}23}\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{s}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$ in the mass range of 5--20 eV. As a result, the decaying cold dark matter explaining the COB excess is strongly disfavored by the anisotropy bound. We discuss some loopholes: e.g., warm/hot dark matter or two-step decay of the dark matter to explain the COB excess.

Abstract Optical transition-edge sensors (TESs) have shown an energy resolution for resolving the number of incident photons at the telecommunication wavelength. However, a higher energy resolution is required for biological imaging and microscopic spectroscopy. In this study, we tested an Au/Ti (10/20 nm) bilayer TES that showed a high energy resolution. The high energy resolution was achieved by lowering the critical temperature <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>T</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">c</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> to 115 mK, and the resultant energy resolution was 67 meV full width at half maximum (FWHM) at 0.8 eV. When <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>T</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">c</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> was reduced to 115 mK, the theoretical resolution would scale up to 30 meV FWHM, considering that the typical energy resolution of optical TESs was 150 meV and <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>T</mml:mi> <mml:mrow> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi mathvariant="normal">c</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:mrow> </mml:msub> </mml:math> was 300 mK. To investigate the difference between the theoretical expectation (30 meV) and the measured value (67 meV), we measured the complex impedance and current noise of the TES. We found excess Johnson noise in the TES; the excess Johnson noise term M was 1.5 at a bias point where the resistance was 10% of the normal resistance. For reference, the above mentioned TES was compared with a TES showing typical energy resolution (156 meV FWHM). We also discussed factors that improved or inhibited the energy resolution.

We study graviton-photon conversion in the magnetosphere of a pulsar and explore the possibility of detecting high frequency gravitational waves with pulsar observations. It is shown that conversion of one polarization mode of photons to that of gravitons can be enhanced significantly due to strong magnetic fields around a pulsar. We also derive the conservative upper bound on stochastic gravitational waves in a frequency range of ${10}^{8}--{10}^{9}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{Hz}$ and ${10}^{13}--{10}^{27}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{Hz}$ by using data of observations of the Crab pulsar and the Geminga pulsar, respectively. Our method widely fills the gap among existing high frequency gravitational wave experiments and boosts the frequency frontier in gravitational wave observations.

Primordial black holes, if considered to constitute a significant fraction of cold dark matter, trace the inhomogeneous large-scale structure of the Universe. Consequently, the stochastic gravitational-wave background, originating from incoherent superposition of unresolved signals emitted by primordial black hole binaries, is expected to display anisotropies across the sky. In this work, we investigate the angular correlations of such anisotropies for the first time and demonstrate their difference from the analogous signal produced by astrophysical black hole binaries. We carefully evaluate the associated uncertainties due to shot-noise and cosmic variance, and demonstrate that the studied signal in the low-frequency regime can be differentiated from the signal of astrophysical origin. Our results are particularly promising in the stellar mass-range, where the identification of the merger origin has been particularly challenging.

A bstract Dark photon dark matter may be produced by the cosmic strings in association with the dark U(1) gauge symmetry breaking. We perform three-dimensional lattice simulations of the Abelian-Higgs model and follow the evolution of cosmic strings. In particular, we simulate the case of (very) light vector boson and find that such vector bosons are efficiently produced by the collapse of small loops while the production is inefficient in the case of heavy vector boson. We calculate the spectrum of the gravitational wave background produced by the cosmic string loops for the light vector boson case and find characteristic features in the spectrum, which can serve as a probe of the dark photon dark matter scenario. In particular, we find that the current ground-based detectors may be sensitive to such gravitational wave signals and also on-going/future pulsar timing observations give stringent constraint on the dark photon dark matter scenario.

Abstract We report an improved measurement of the degree-scale cosmic microwave background B -mode angular-power spectrum over 670 deg 2 sky area at 150 GHz with P olarbear . In the original analysis of the data, errors in the angle measurement of the continuously rotating half-wave plate, a polarization modulator, caused significant data loss. By introducing an angle-correction algorithm, the data volume is increased by a factor of 1.8. We report a new analysis using the larger data set. We find the measured B -mode spectrum is consistent with the ΛCDM model with Galactic dust foregrounds. We estimate the contamination of the foreground by cross-correlating our data and Planck 143, 217, and 353 GHz measurements, where its spectrum is modeled as a power law in angular scale and a modified blackbody in frequency. We place an upper limit on the tensor-to-scalar ratio r &lt; 0.33 at 95% confidence level after marginalizing over the foreground parameters.

Abstract We study the graviton–photon conversion in the magnetic fields of the Earth, the Milky Way, and intergalactic regions. Requiring that the photon flux converted from gravitons does not exceed the observed photon flux with telescopes, we derive upper limits on the stochastic gravitational waves in frequency ranges from 107–1035 Hz. Remarkably, the upper limits on h2ΩGW could be less than unity in the frequency range of 1018–1023 Hz in a specific case. The detection of gravitational waves using telescopes could open up a new avenue for high frequency gravitational wave observations.

Abstract We construct a viable model of the vector coherent oscillation dark matter. The vector boson is coupled to the inflaton through the kinetic function so that the effective Hubble mass term is cancelled out. In order to avoid strong constraints from isocurvature perturbation and statistically anisotropic curvature perturbation, the inflaton is arranged so that it does not contribute to the observed large scale curvature perturbation and we introduce a curvaton. We found viable vector coherent oscillation dark matter scenario for the wide vector mass range from 10 -21 eV to 1 eV.

Abstract We study the possibility of using the LiteBIRD satellite B -mode survey to constrain models of inflation producing specific features in CMB angular power spectra. We explore a particular model example, i.e. spectator axion-SU(2) gauge field inflation. This model can source parity-violating gravitational waves from the amplification of gauge field fluctuations driven by a pseudoscalar “axionlike” field, rolling for a few e-folds during inflation. The sourced gravitational waves can exceed the vacuum contribution at reionization bump scales by about an order of magnitude and can be comparable to the vacuum contribution at recombination bump scales. We argue that a satellite mission with full sky coverage and access to the reionization bump scales is necessary to understand the origin of the primordial gravitational wave signal and distinguish among two production mechanisms: quantum vacuum fluctuations of spacetime and matter sources during inflation. We present the expected constraints on model parameters from LiteBIRD satellite simulations, which complement and expand previous studies in the literature. We find that LiteBIRD will be able to exclude with high significance standard single-field slow-roll models, such as the Starobinsky model, if the true model is the axion-SU(2) model with a feature at CMB scales. We further investigate the possibility of using the parity-violating signature of the model, such as the TB and EB angular power spectra, to disentangle it from the standard single-field slow-roll scenario. We find that most of the discriminating power of LiteBIRD will reside in BB angular power spectra rather than in TB and EB correlations.

Abstract We study the effects of velocity dispersion on the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs) in a matter-dominated era. The velocity dispersion is generated through the nonlinear growth of perturbations and has the potential to impede the gravitational collapse and thereby the formation of PBHs. To make discussions clear, we consider two distinct length scales. The larger one is where gravitational collapse occurs which could lead to PBH formation, and the smaller one is where the velocity dispersion develops due to nonlinear interactions. We estimate the effect of the velocity dispersion on the PBH formation by comparing the free-fall timescale and the timescale for a particle to cross the collapsing region. As a demonstration, we consider a log-normal power spectrum for the initial density perturbation with the peak value σ 0 2 at a scale that corresponds to the larger scale. We find that the threshold value of the density perturbation δ̃ th at the horizon entry for the PBH formation scales as δ̃ th ∝ σ 0 2/5 for σ 0 ≪ 1.

Causal soliton formation (e.g. oscillons, Q-balls) in the primordial Universe is expected to give rise to a universal gravitational wave (GW) background, at frequencies smaller than scales of nonlinearity. We show that modifications of the soliton density field, driven by soliton interactions or initial conditions, can significantly enhance universal GWs. Gravitational clustering of solitons naturally leads to generation of correlations in the large-scale soliton density field. As we demonstrate for axion-like particle (ALP) oscillons, the growing power spectrum amplifies universal GW signals, opening new avenues for probing the physics of the early Universe with upcoming GW experiments. Our results are applicable to variety of scenarios, such as solitons interacting through a long range Yukawa-like fifth force.

Stellar-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) from the early Universe can directly contribute to the gravitational wave (GW) events observed by LIGO, but can only comprise a subdominant component of the dark matter (DM). The primary DM constituent will generically form massive halos around seeding stellar-mass PBHs. We demonstrate that gravitational lensing of sources at cosmological (≳Gpc) distances can directly explore DM halo dresses engulfing PBHs, challenging for lensing of local sources in the vicinity of Milky Way. Strong lensing analysis of fast radio bursts detected by CHIME survey already starts to probe parameter space of dressed stellar-mass PBHs, and upcoming searches can efficiently explore dressed PBHs over ∼10−105M⊙ mass-range and provide a stringent test of the PBH scenario for the GW events. Our findings establish a general test for a broad class of DM models with stellar-mass PBHs, including those where QCD axions or WIMP-like particles comprise predominant DM. The results open a new route for exploring dressed PBHs with various types of lensing events at cosmological distances, such as supernovae and caustic crossings.

Recently, ultrashort laser processing has attracted attention for creating nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers because this method can create single NV centers in spatially-controlled positions, which is an advantage for quantum information devices. On the other hand, creating high-density NV centers in a wide region is also important for quantum sensing because the sensitivity is directly enhanced by increasing the number of NV centers. A recent study demonstrated the creation of high-density NV centers by irradiating femtosecond laser pulses, but the created region was limited to micrometer size, and this technique required many laser pulses to avoid graphitization of diamond. Here, we demonstrate the creation of NV centers in a wide region using only an intense single femtosecond laser pulse irradiation. We irradiated a diamond sample with a femtosecond laser with a focal spot size of 41 µm and a laser fluence of up to 54 J/cm2, which is much higher than the typical graphitization threshold in multi-pulse processing. We found that single-pulse irradiation created NV centers without post-annealing for a laser fluence higher than 1.8 J/cm2, and the region containing NV centers expanded with increasing laser fluence. The diameter of the area was larger than the focal spot size and reached over 100 µm at a fluence of 54 J/cm2. Furthermore, we demonstrated the NV centers’ creation in a millimeter-sized region by a single-shot defocused laser pulse over 1100 µm with a fluence of 33 J/cm2. The demonstrated technique will bring interest in the fundamentals and applications of fabricating ultrahigh-sensitivity quantum sensors.

Abstract Richardson–Lucy (RL) deconvolution is one of the classical methods widely used in X-ray astronomy and other areas. Amid recent progress in image processing, RL deconvolution still leaves much room for improvement under realistic situations. One direction is to include the positional dependence of a point-spread function (PSF), so-called RL deconvolution with a spatially variant PSF (RL sv ). Another is the method of estimating a reliable number of iterations and their associated uncertainties. We developed a practical method that incorporates the RL sv algorithm and the estimation of uncertainties. As a typical example of bright and high-resolution images, the Chandra X-ray image of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A was used in this paper. RL sv deconvolution enables us to uncover the smeared features in the forward/backward shocks and jet-like structures. We constructed a method to predict the appropriate number of iterations using statistical fluctuation of the observed images. Furthermore, the uncertainties were estimated by error propagation from the last iteration, which was phenomenologically tested with the observed data. Thus, our method is a practically efficient framework to evaluate the time evolution of the remnants and their fine structures embedded in high-resolution X-ray images.

LiteBIRD is a planned JAXA-led cosmic microwave background (CMB) B -mode satellite experiment aiming for launch in the late 2020s, with a primary goal of detecting the imprint of primordial inflationary gravitational waves. Its current baseline focal-plane configuration includes 15 frequency bands between 40 and 402 GHz, fulfilling the mission requirements to detect the amplitude of gravitational waves with the total uncertainty on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, δr , down to δr &lt; 0.001. A key aspect of this performance is accurate astrophysical component separation, and the ability to remove polarized thermal dust emission is particularly important. In this paper we note that the CMB frequency spectrum falls off nearly exponentially above 300 GHz relative to the thermal dust spectral energy distribution, and a relatively minor high frequency extension can therefore result in even lower uncertainties and better model reconstructions. Specifically, we compared the baseline design with five extended configurations, while varying the underlying dust modeling, in each of which the High-Frequency Telescope (HFT) frequency range was shifted logarithmically toward higher frequencies, with an upper cutoff ranging between 400 and 600 GHz. In each case, we measured the tensor-to-scalar ratio r uncertainty and bias using both parametric and minimum-variance component-separation algorithms. When the thermal dust sky model includes a spatially varying spectral index and temperature, we find that the statistical uncertainty on r after foreground cleaning may be reduced by as much as 30–50% by extending the upper limit of the frequency range from 400 to 600 GHz, with most of the improvement already gained at 500 GHz. We also note that a broader frequency range leads to higher residuals when fitting an incorrect dust model, but also it is easier to discriminate between models through higher χ 2 sensitivity. Even in the case in which the fitting procedure does not correspond to the underlying dust model in the sky, and when the highest frequency data cannot be modeled with sufficient fidelity and must be excluded from the analysis, the uncertainty on r increases by only about 5% for a 500 GHz configuration compared to the baseline.