Related papers: Cosmological perturbations through the big bang
We investigate the effects of large scalar inhomogeneities during the kination epoch, a period in which the universe's dynamics are dominated by the kinetic energy of a scalar field, by fully evolving the Einstein equations using numerical…
Over the last few years, it was realised that non-canonical scalar fields can lead to the accelerated expansion in the early universe. The primordial spectrum in these scenarios not only shows near scale-invariance consistent with CMB…
In order to account for the observable Universe, any comprehensive theory or model of cosmology must draw from many disciplines of physics, including gauge theories of strong and weak interactions, the hydrodynamics and microphysics of…
Quantum field theory, which is generally used to describe the origin of large-scale gravitational perturbations during cosmic inflation, has been shown to omit an important physical effect in curved space-time, the nonlocal entanglement…
We define fully non-perturbative generalizations of the uniform density and comoving curvature perturbations, which are known, in the linear theory, to be conserved on sufficiently large scales for adiabatic perturbations. Our non-linear…
These lecture notes discuss several topics in the physics of cosmic structure formation starting from the evolution of small-amplitude fluctuations in the radiation-dominated era. The topics include relativistic cosmological perturbation…
We consider the construction of nonsingular Pre-Big-Bang and Ekpyrotic type cosmological models realized by the addition to the action of specific higher-order terms stemming from quantum corrections. We study models involving general…
We point out that in the context of ``two-metric'' theories of gravity there is the possibility that cosmic defects will produce a spectrum of primordial adiabatic density perturbations. This will happen when the speed characterising the…
We present the analytic forms for the spectra of the cosmological perturbations from an initially anisotropic universe for the high momentum modes in the context of WKB approximations, as the continuation of the work [29]. We consider the…
We present a short introduction to a non-standard cosmological scenario motivated by the duality symmetries of string theory, in which the big bang singularity is replaced with a "big bounce" at high but finite curvature. The bouncing epoch…
In string theory, the traditional picture of a Universe that emerges from the inflation of a very small and highly curved space-time patch is a possibility, not a necessity: quite different initial conditions are possible, and not…
We demonstrate that any scaling source in the radiation era produces a background of gravitational waves with an exact scale-invariant power spectrum. Cosmic defects, created after a phase transition in the early Universe, are such a…
In the standard picture of cosmological structure formation, the Universe we see today is evolved under the gravitational instability from tiny random fluctuations. In this talk I discuss the onset of non-linearity in the large scale…
Scalar fields with an energy density dominated by its kinetic part may have played a relevant role in the very early stages of the Universe. Compared to the standard inflationary paradigm, they may lead to modifications in observable…
The statistical properties of the primordial density perturbations has been considered in the past decade as a powerful probe of the physical processes taking place in the early universe. Within the inflationary paradigm, the properties of…
It is shown how cosmological perturbation theory arises from a fully quantized perturbative theory of quantum gravity. Central for the derivation is a non-perturbative concept of gauge-invariant local observables by means of which…
The evolution of the rotational inhomogeneities is investigated in the specific framework of four-dimensional pre-big bang models. While minimal (dilaton-driven) scenarios do not lead to rotational fluctuations, in the case of non-minimal…
We consider the presence and evolution of primordial density perturbations in a cosmological model based on a simple ansatz which captures -- by providing a set of effective gravitational field equations -- the strength of the enhanced…
The standard inflationary version of the origin of the cosmic structure as the result of the quantum fluctuations during the inflationary stage is less than fully satisfactory: how exactly does the Universe transit from a homogeneous and…
We present the results of a detailed study of how isocurvature axion fluctuations are converted into adiabatic metric perturbations through axion decay, and discuss the constraints on the parameters of pre-big bang cosmology needed for…