http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.01910
Measurements of the luminosity distance have played a key role in discovering the late-time cosmic accel- eration. However, when accounting for inhomogeneities in the Universe, its interpretation has been plagued with infrared divergences in its theoretical predictions, which are in some cases used to explain the cosmic ac- celeration without dark energy. The divergences in most calculations are artificially removed by imposing an infrared cut-off scale. For the first time, we show that a gauge-invariant calculation of the luminosity distance is devoid of such divergences and consistent with the equivalence principle, eliminating the need to impose a cut-off scale. We present proper numerical calculations of the luminosity distance using the gauge-invariant expression and demonstrate that the numerical results with an ad hoc cut-off scale in previous calculations have negligible systematic errors as long as the cut-off scale is larger than the horizon scale. We discuss the origin of infrared divergences and their cancellation in the luminosity distance.
S. Biern and J. Yoo
Wed, 8 Jun 16
42/45
Comments: 5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PRL
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