Related papers: Encoding cosmological futures with conformal struc…
Cosmology today is confronted with several seemingly insoluble puzzles and strange, inexplicable coincidences. But a careful re-examination of the Cosmological principle and the Weyl postulate, foundational elements in this subject,…
I investigate spacetime singularities from the point of view of the wavefunction of the universe. In order to extend the classical notion of geodesic incompleteness one has to include the proper time of an observer as a degree of freedom in…
For a few years now, cosmology has a standard model. By this term, we mean a consistent theoretical background which is at the same time simple and broad enough to offer coherent explanations for the vast majority of cosmological phenomena.…
We explore the effects of a positive cosmological constant on astrophysical and cosmological configurations described by a polytropic equation of state. We derive the conditions for equilibrium and stability of such configurations and…
Large-scale cosmic microwave background anisotropies in homogeneous, globally anisotropic cosmologies are investigated. We perform a statistical analysis in which the four-year data from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite is searched…
We study the emergent dynamics of an anisotropic universe in the context of Group Field Theory condensate cosmology, with a scalar field playing the role of a relational clock. According to different definitions of ``isotropy'', two…
We investigate cosmological constraints on primordial isocurvature and tensor perturbations, using recent observations of the cosmic microwave background and the large scale structure. We find that present observations are consistent with…
We reexamine constraints on the spatial size of closed toroidal models with cold dark matter and the cosmological constant from cosmic microwave background. We carry out Bayesian analyses using the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) data…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
Cosmological models can be studied effectively using dynamical systems techniques. Starting from Brown's formulation of the variational principle for relativistic fluids, we introduce new types of couplings involving a perfect fluid, a…
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…
The linear cosmological perturbation theory of an almost homogeneous and isotropic perfect fluid universe is reconsidered and formally simplified by introducing new covariant and gauge-invariant variables with physical interpretations on…
Quantum cosmology in the presence of a fundamental minimal length is analyzed in the context of the flat isotropic and the Taub cosmological models. Such minimal scale comes out from a generalized uncertainty principle and the quantization…
Recent analysis of the Planck measurements opened a possibility that we live in a non-flat universe. Given the renewed interest in non-zero spatial curvature, here we re-visit the light propagation in a non-flat universe and provide the…
The inherent difficulty in talking about quantum decoherence in the context of quantum cosmology is that decoherence requires subsystems, and cosmology is the study of the whole Universe. Consistent histories gave a possible answer to this…
Penrose proposed that the big bang singularity should be constrained by requiring that the Weyl curvature vanishes there. The idea behind this past hypothesis is attractive because it constrains the initial conditions for the universe in…
We analyze gravitational theories with quadratic curvature terms, including the case of conformally invariant Weyl gravity, motivated by the intention to find a renormalizable theory of gravity in the ultraviolet region, yet yielding…
The algebra of linear and quadratic functions of basic observables on the phase space of either the free particle or the harmonic oscillator possesses a finite-dimensional anomaly. The quantization of these systems outside the critical…
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…
We consider a very general scenario of our universe where its geometry is characterized by the Finslerian structure on the underlying spacetime manifold, a generalization of the Riemannian geometry. Now considering a general energy-momentum…