Related papers: The probability of inflation in Loop Quantum Cosmo…
Closed, singularity-free, inflationary cosmological models have recently been studied in the context of general relativity. Despite their appeal, these so called emergent models suffer from a number of limitations. These include the fact…
We study the importance of lattice refinement in achieving a successful inflationary era. We solve, in the continuum limit, the second order difference equation governing the quantum evolution in loop quantun cosmology, assuming both a…
We discuss the implications of purely classical, instead of quantum, theory of gravity for the gravitational wave spectrum generated during inflation. We show that a positive detection of primordial gravitational waves will no longer…
Cosmological inflation gives a natural answer for a variety of cosmological questions, including the horizon problem, the flatness problem, and others. However, inflation yields new questions relating to the flatness of the inflaton…
Once quantum corrections are taken into account, the strong coupling limit of the $\xi$-attractor models (in metric gravity) might depart from the usual Starobinsky solution and move into linear inflation. Furthermore, it is well known that…
In this thesis we present the cosmological applications of some proposals from Quantum Gravity. Namely, we will explore classical and quantum cosmological implications of the Generalized Uncertainty Principle (GUP), the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz…
We present a quantum quadratic gravity inflationary scenario that can accommodate the new cosmological constraints, which have disfavored Starobinsky inflation. The theory is asymptotically free in the ultraviolet, but 1-loop running is…
Nonminimal coupling of the inflaton field to the Ricci curvature of spacetime is generally unavoidable, and the paradigm of inflation should be generalized by including the corresponding term in the Lagrangian of the inflationary theory.…
Cosmic inflation may exhibit stochastic periods during which quantum fluctuations dominate over the semi-classical evolution. Extracting observables in these regimes is a notoriously difficult program as quantum randomness makes them fully…
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…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
We study inflation for a quantum scalar electrodynamics model in curved space-time and for higher-derivative quantum gravity (QG) coupled with scalar electrodynamics. The corresponding renormalization-group (RG) improved potential is…
Inflation predicts that quantum fluctuations determine the large scale structure of the Universe. This raises the striking possibility that quantum mechanics, developed to describe nature at short distances, can be tested by studying nature…
A Planck scale inflationary era -- in a quantum gravity theory predicting discreteness of quantum geometry at the fundamental scale -- produces the scale invariant spectrum of inhomogeneities with very small tensor-to-scalar ratio of…
In this work we use the Loop Quantum Cosmology modified scalar-tensor reconstruction techniques in order to investigate how bouncing and inflationary cosmologies can be realized. With regard to the inflationary cosmologies, we shall be…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
The relaxion scenario presents an intriguing extension of the standard model in which the particle introduced to solve to the strong CP problem, the axion, also achieves the dynamical relaxation of the Higgs boson mass term. In this work we…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
A unified description of early-time inflation with the current cosmic acceleration is achieved by means of a new theory that uses a quadratic model of gravity, with the inclusion of an exponential $F(R)$-gravity contribution for dark…
In Loop Quantum Gravity mathematically rigorous models of full quantum gravity were proposed. In this paper we study a cosmological sector of one of the models describing quantum gravity with positive cosmological constant coupled to…