Related papers: Constraints on dark energy and cosmic topology
Two fundamental questions regarding our description of the Universe concern the geometry and topology of its 3-dimensional space. While geometry is a local characteristic that gives the intrinsic curvature, topology is a global feature that…
The ability to test the nature of dark mass-energy components in the universe through large-scale structure studies hinges on accurate predictions of sky survey expectations within a given world model. Numerical simulations predict key…
An impressive amount of different astrophysical data converges towards the picture of a spatially flat universe undergoing a today phase of accelerated expansion. The nature of the dark energy dominating the energy content of the universe…
In an undulant universe, cosmic expansion is characterized by alternating periods of acceleration and deceleration. We examine cosmologies in which the dark-energy equation of state varies periodically with the number of e-foldings of the…
By incorporating the holographic principle in a time-depending Lambda-term cosmology, new physical bounds on the arbitrary parameters of the model can be obtained. Considering then the dark energy as a purely geometric entity, for which no…
The space-like hypersurface of the Universe at the present cosmological time is a three-dimensional manifold. A non-trivial global topology of this space-like hypersurface would imply that the apparently observable universe (the sphere of…
Is the universe finite or infinite, and what shape does it have? These fundamental questions, of which relatively little is known, are typically studied within the context of the standard model of cosmology where the universe is assumed to…
Recent observations suggest that the ratio of the total density to the critical density of the universe, $\Omega_0$, is likely to be very close to one, with a significant proportion of this energy being in the form of a dark component with…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak gravitational lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-convergence…
The Einstein field equations of general relativity constrain the local curvature at every point in spacetime, but say nothing about the global topology of the Universe. Cosmic microwave background anisotropies have proven to be the most…
The apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe is forcing us to examine the foundational aspects of the standard model of cosmology -- in particular, the fact that dark energy is a direct consequence of the homogeneity assumption. We…
I briefly outline a new physical interpretation to the average cosmological parameters for an inhomogeneous universe with backreaction. The variance in local geometry and gravitational energy between ideal isotropic observers in bound…
Homogeneity is a crucial, but poorly tested, assumption in cosmology. We introduce a new approach which allows us to place limits on the presence of localized structures within essentially our entire observable volume, using cosmic…
The combination of multiple observational probes has long been advocated as a powerful technique to constrain cosmological parameters, in particular dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey has measured 207 spectroscopically--confirmed Type Ia…
Observations of microwave background fluctuations can yield information not only about the geometry of the universe, but potentially about the topology of the universe. If the universe is negatively curved, then the characteristic scale for…
If the universe is finite and smaller than the distance to the surface of last scatter, then the signature of the topology of the universe is writ on the microwave background sky. Previous efforts to search for this topology have focused on…
If the universe is finite and smaller than the distance to the surface of last scatter, then the signature of the topology of the universe is writ large on the microwave background sky. We show that the microwave background will be…
If the spatial section of the universe is multiply connected, repeated images or patterns are expected to be detected observationally. However, due to the finite distance to the last scattering surface, such pattern repetitions could be…
We explore local consequences of a non-zero cosmological constant on astrophysical structures. We find that the effects are not only sensitive to the density of the configurations but also to the geometry. For non-homogeneous…
The fact that the energy densities of dark energy and matter are similar currently, known as the coincidence problem, is one of the main unsolved problems of cosmology. We present here a model in which a spatial curvature of the universe…