Direct couplings of mimetic dark matter and their cosmological effects

The original mimetic model was proposed to take the role of dark matter. In this paper we consider possible direct interactions of mimetic dark matter with other matter in the universe, especially standard model particles such as baryons and photons. By imposing shift symmetry, the mimetic dark matter field can only have derivative couplings. We discuss the possibilities of generating baryon number asymmetry and cosmic birefringence in the universe based on the derivative couplings of mimetic dark matter to baryons and photons.     

Conformal invariant cosmological perturbations via the covariant approach:multicomponent universe

In recent years there has been a lot of interest in discussing frame dependences/independences of the cosmological perturbations under the conformal transformations. This problem has previously been investigated in terms of the covariant approach for a single component universe, and it was found that the covariant approach is very powerful to pick out the perturbative variables which are both gauge and conformal invariant. In this work, we extend the covariant approach to a universe with multicomponent fluids. We find that similar results can be derived,as expected. In addition, some other interesting perturbations are also identified to be conformal invariant, such as entropy perturbation between two different components.