Related papers: Statistical anisotropy as a consequence of inflati…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies have and will continue to revolutionize our understanding of cosmology. The recent discovery of the previously predicted acoustic peaks in the power spectrum has established a…
Transition to the semiclassical behaviour and the decoherence process for inhomogeneous perturbations generated from the vacuum state during an inflationary stage in the early Universe are considered both in the Heisenberg and the…
Cosmic inflation, which describes an accelerated expansion of the early Universe, yields the most successful predictions regarding temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Nevertheless, the precise origin of the…
According to cosmological inflation, the inhomogeneities in our universe are of quantum mechanical origin. This scenario is phenomenologically very appealing as it solves the puzzles of the standard hot big bang model and naturally explains…
One of the major predictions of inflation is the existence of a stochastic background of cosmological gravitational waves (GW). These gravitational waves can induce significant temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background…
The purpose of these lectures is to give a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the production of primordial perturbations, as well as a review of some of the latest developments in this domain. After a short introduction, we review…
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
Cosmic string networks generate cosmological perturbations actively throughout the history of the universe. Thus, the string sourced anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background is not affected by Silk damping as much as the anisotropy…
As previously discussed in (D. Sudarsky, Int.J.Mod.Phys.D20:509-552, (2011); [arXiv:0906.0315]), the inflationary account for the emergence of the seeds of cosmic structure falls short of actually explaining the generation of primordial…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
A short introduction to structure formation is given, followed by a discussion of the possible characteristics of the initial perturbations assuming a generic inflationary origin. Observational data related to large-scale structure and the…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies from primordial magnetic fields are studied. In addition to the known passive and the compensated mode we discuss an inflationary magnetic mode in the curvature perturbation,…
It is likely that the observed large-angular-scale anisotropies in the microwave background radiation are induced by the cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. Such perturbations are now placed in squeezed vacuum quantum…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
Recent observations about the cosmic microwave background evidence a clear discrepancy between the scale of inflation and the Planck scale expected in the conventional inflationary picture, based on simple chaotic inflationary models. This…
We show that cosmological quantum relaxation predicts an anisotropic primordial power spectrum with a specific dependence on wavenumber k. We explore some of the consequences for precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background…
The large-scale power deficit in the cosmic microwave background fluctuations might be relevant with the physics of pre-inflation, a bounce, or a superinflationary phase preceding slow-roll inflation, which can provide a singular-free…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
Single field inflationary models that seek to greatly enhance small scale power in order to form primordial black holes predict both a squeezed bispectrum that is enhanced by this small scale power and a potentially detectable enhancement…
It is commonly assumed that the stochastic background of gravitational waves on cosmological scales follows an almost scale-independent power spectrum, as generically predicted by the inflationary paradigm. However, it is not inconceivable…