Related papers: Inflationary Perturbations: the Cosmological Schwi…
These lectures provide a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the theory of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation which are thought to be the origin of structure in the universe.
Environment interaction may induce stochastic semiclassical dynamics in open quantum systems. In the gravitational context, stress-energy fluctuations of quantum matter fields give rise to a stochastic behaviour in the spacetime geometry.…
We investigate classical and quantum correlations of a quantum field in the inflationary universe using a particle detector model. By considering the entanglement and correlations between two comoving detectors interacting with a scalar…
The notion of vacuum fluctuations of the gravitational field plays important role in cosmology. The strong variable gravitational field of the very early Universe amplifies these fluctuations and transforms them into macroscopical…
The difficult issues related to the interpretation of quantum mechanics and, in particular, the "measurement problem" are revisited using as motivation the process of generation of structure from quantum fluctuations in inflationary…
We extend the theory of cosmological perturbations to the case when the ``matter'' Lagrangian is an arbitrary function of the scalar field and its first derivatives. In particular, this extension provides a unified description of known…
In the context of Quantum Cosmology and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation we investigate the possible effects of a non semiclassical wave-function of the universe on the evolution of the inflationary perturbations. These are associated with the…
After a brief summary of decoherence and quantum to classical transition in cosmology we focus on the study of quantum decoherence of cosmological perturbations in inflationary universe, that does not rely on any environment. This is what…
The behaviour of quantum metric perturbations produced during inflation is considered at the stage after the second Hubble radius crossing. It is shown that the classical correlation between amplitude and momentum of a perturbation mode,…
The status of quantum cosmologies as testable models of the early universe is assessed in the context of inflation. While traditional Wheeler-DeWitt quantization is unable to produce sizable effects in the cosmic microwave background, the…
Whereas the total energy in zero-point fluctuations of the particle physics vacuum gives rise to the cosmological constant problem, differences in the vacuum give rise to real physical phenomena, such as the Casimir effect. Hence we…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
We consider a gravitational analogue of the Schwinger effect in a cosmological context. While the Schwinger effect is usually attributed to a static electric background, its derivation is actually based on a switching on/off of the electric…
Cosmic inflation is commonly assumed to be driven by quantum fields. Quantum mechanics predicts phenomena such as quantum fluctuations and tunneling of the field. Here we show an example of a quantum interference effect which goes beyond…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…
The production of a stochastic background of gravitational waves is a fundamental prediction of any cosmological inflationary model. The features of such a signal encode unique information about the physics of the Early Universe and beyond,…
This thesis is centered on three main subjects within the theory of inflation and cosmological perturbations: loop corrections to the power spectrum of curvature fluctuations generated during inflation; evolution of cosmological…
During inflation explicit perturbative computations of quantum field theories which contain massless, non-conformal fields exhibit secular effects that grow as powers of the logarithm of the inflationary scale factor. Starobinski\u{\i}'s…
Quantum gravitational back-reaction offers the potential of simultaneously resolving the problem of the cosmological constant and providing a natural model of inflation in which scalars play no special role. In this model inflation begins…