Related papers: Escaping the crunch: gravitational effects in clas…
Eternal inflation is shown to require violations of the Null Energy Condition (NEC) on superhorizon scales. With light scalar fields as the matter sources in a de Sitter background, there can be no classical or semiclassical violations of…
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
We propose a new class of inflationary solutions to the standard cosmological problems (horizon, flatness, monopole,...), based on a modification of old inflation. These models do not require a potential which satisfies the normal…
We consider bubble collisions in single scalar field theories with multiple vacua. Recent work has argued that at sufficiently high impact velocities, collisions between such bubble vacua are governed by 'free passage' dynamics in which…
We examine from first principles one of the basic assumptions of modern quantum theories of structure formation in the early universe, i.e., the conditions upon which fluctuations of a quantum field may transmute into classical stochastic…
We consider true vacuum bubbles generated in a first order phase transition occurring during the slow rolling era of a two field inflation: it is known that gravitational waves are produced by the collision of such bubbles. We find that the…
In a situation like eternal inflation, where our data is replicated at infinitely-many other space-time events, it is necessary to make a prior assumption about our location to extract predictions. The principle of mediocrity entails that…
In a previous work we have exhibited a clear description of the quantum-to-classical transition of cosmological quantum fluctuations in the inflationary scenario using the de Broglie-Bohm quantum theory. These fluctuations are believed to…
We compare the correlation functions of inflationary perturbations computed either with quantum or classical dynamics. Even if they are enforced to agree at a specific time during inflation, classical and quantum correlations will differ at…
We investigate an influence of virtual particles on the classical motion of a system in Minkowski and Euclidean spaces. Our results indicate that fluctuations of fields different from the main field decelerate significantly its motion at…
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…
We propose a class of scalar models that, once coupled to gravity, lead to cosmologies that smoothly and stably connect an inflationary quasi-de Sitter universe to a low, or even zero-curvature, maximally symmetric spacetime in the…
In this paper we generalize the black hole bound of arXiv:0706.2050 to de Sitter spaces, and apply it to various vacua in the landscape, with a special emphasis on slow-roll inflationary vacua. Non-trivial constraints on the lifetime and…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
We study the inflationary quantum-to-classical transition for the adiabatic curvature perturbation $\zeta$ due to quantum decoherence, focusing on the role played by squeezed-limit mode couplings. We evolve the quantum state $\Psi$ in the…
Every de Sitter vacuum can transition to every other de Sitter vacuum despite any obstacle, despite intervening anti-de Sitter sinks, despite not being connected by an instanton. Eternal inflation populates the whole landscape.
Environment interaction may induce stochastic semiclassical dynamics in open quantum systems. In the gravitational context, stress-energy fluctuations of quantum matter fields give rise to a stochastic behaviour in the spacetime geometry.…
Theoretical considerations motivate us to consider vacuum energy to be able to decay and to assume that the spatial geometry of the universe is closed. Combining both aspects leads to the possibility that the universe, or certain regions…
Features in the inflationary landscape can inject extra energies to inflation models and produce on-shell particles with masses much larger than the Hubble scale of inflation. This possibility extends the energy reach of the program of…
In the eternally inflationary background driven by the metastable vacua of the landscape, it is possible that some local quantum fluctuations with the null energy condition violation can be large enough to stride over the barriers among…