4 1 Standard framework 5 1.1 Big bang models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 1.2 The cosmic microwave background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 2 Characterizing early Universe fluctuations 15 2.1 Density fluctuations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 2.2 CMB temperature fluctuations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2.3 Fluctua...

A microscopic theory of solvent reorganization energy in polar molecular solvents is developed. The theory represents the solvent response as a combination of the density and polarization fluctuations of the solvent given in terms of the density and polarization structure factors. A fully analytical formulation of the theory is provided for a solute of arbitrary shape with an arbitrary distribu...

Understanding the role of consumers in density-dependent plant population dynamics is a long-standing goal in ecology. However, the generality of herbivory effects across heterogeneous landscapes is poorly understood due to the pervasive influence of context-dependence. We tested effects of native insect herbivory on the population dynamics of an exotic thistle, Cirsium vulgare, in a field expe...

Rich clusters of galaxies are observed to be strongly correlated at distances where the correlations of individual galaxies appear to be negligible. ' For example, the two-point correlation function for Abell clusters (richness R & 1) is unity at about 25k ' Mpc, where h is the Hubble constant and Mpc denotes megaparsecs, while the two-point correlation function for galaxies is unity at about 5...

We numerically analyze the density field of three-dimensional randomly jammed packings of monodisperse soft frictionless spherical particles, paying special attention to fluctuations occurring at large length scales. We study in detail the two-point static structure factor at low wave vectors in Fourier space. We also analyze the nature of the density field in real space by studying the large-d...

The degree to which population fluctuations arise from variable adult survival relative to variable recruitment has been debated widely for marine organisms. Disentangling these effects remains challenging because data generally are not sufficient to evaluate if and how adult survival rates are regulated by stochasticity and/or population density. Using unique time series for a largely unexploi...

We calculate the effects of random density fluctuations on twoneutrino flavor transformations (ντ(μ) ⇀↽ νe) in the post-core-bounce supernova environment. In particular, we follow numerically the flavor evolution of neutrino states propagating through a stochastic field of density fluctuations. We examine the approach to neutrino flavor depolarization, and study the effects of this phenomenon i...

Deviations from the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) cosmological model in the form of density inhomogeneities induce observational effects on the light propagating through these fluctuations. Using a rigorously parametrized metricwhose pseudo-Newtonian potential is related to (possibly nonlinear) density inhomogeneities through a relativistic Green function, the behavior of radiation propagati...

The degree of linear polarization has recently been found to show wide random variations over the solar disk. These variations are presumably at least partly due to fluctuations in the flux density of turbulent photospheric magnetic fields and associated variations in the degree of Hanle depolarization. In order to understand the origin of such large scale fluctuations of the turbulent magnetic...