Quantum peculiarities of the primordial hydrogen recombination

Some problems of the two-photon decay of highly excited atomic hydrogen and helium levels are considered. The necessary accuracy of calculating the transition probabilities is shown to require abandoning the purely dipole approximation in the theory of atomic hydrogen radiation. The range of applicability of the perturbation theory to this process is discussed. We suggest a new mechanism of the Lyman photon redistribution due to very close locations of the 20P and 19P levels in the hydrogen and deuterium atoms, respectively (hydrogen-deuterium resonance).     

Virialization of cosmological structures in models with time-varying equation of state

We study the virialization of the cosmic structures in the framework of flat cosmological models where the dark energy component plays an important role in the global dynamics of the Universe. In particular, our analysis focuses on the study of the spherical matter perturbations, as the latter decouple from the background expansion, start to 'turn around' and finally collapse. We generalize this procedure, taking into account models with an equation of state which vary with time, and provide a complete formulation of the cluster virialization attempting to address the non-linear regime of structure formation. In particular, assuming that clusters have collapsed prior to the epoch of z _f≃ 1.4, in which the most distant cluster has been found, we show that the behaviour of the spherical collapse model depends on the functional form of the equation of state.     

Statistical analysis of galaxy surveys – III. The non-linear clustering of red and blue galaxies in the 2dFGRS

We present measurements of the higher order clustering of red and blue galaxies as a function of scale and luminosity made from the two-degree field galaxy redshift survey (2dFGRS). We use a counts-in-cells analysis to estimate the volume-averaged correlation functions,     , as a function of scale up to the order of   p = 5  , and also the reduced void probability function. Hierarchical amplitudes are constructed using the estimates of the correlation functions:     . We find that (i) red galaxies display stronger clustering than blue galaxies at all orders measured; (ii) red galaxies show values of   S _p   that are strongly dependent on luminosity whereas blue galaxies show no segregation in   S _p   within the errors; this is remarkable given the segregation in the variance; (iii) the linear relative bias shows the opposite trend to the hierarchical amplitudes, with little segregation for the red sequence and some segregation for the blue; (iv) faint red galaxies deviate significantly from the 'universal' negative binomial reduced void probabilities followed by all other galaxy populations. Our results show that the characteristic colour of a galaxy population reveals a unique signature in its spatial distribution. Such signatures will hopefully further elucidate the physics responsible for shaping the cosmological evolution of galaxies.