Dark energy and inhomogeneity
Chris Clarkson
University of Cape Town
Wed, Apr. 27th 2011, 14:15
Salle Claude Itzykson, Bât. 774, Orme des Merisiers
I consider some of the issues we face in trying to understand dark energy. I discuss how the averaging problem confuses our potential understanding of dark energy by considering the backreaction from density perturbations to second-order in the concordance model: this effect leads to at least a 10\% change in the observed value of the deceleration parameter, and could be significantly higher. Large Hubble-scale inhomogeneity has not been investigated in much detail, and could conceivably be the cause of apparent cosmic acceleration. I discuss void models which defy the Copernican principle in our Hubble patch, and describe how we can potentially rule out these models.
Contact : ccaprini