Related papers: The Big Bang and the Quantum
It is known that certain quantum cosmological models present quantum behavior for large scale factors. Since quantization can suppress past singularities, it is natural to inquire whether quantum effects can prevent future singularities. To…
The pre--big bang cosmological scenario is studied within the context of the Brans--Dicke theory of gravity. An epoch of superinflationary expansion may occur in the pre--big bang phase of the Universe's history in a certain region of…
Understanding gravitational collapse requires understanding how $\sim 10^{58}$ nucleons can be destroyed in $\sim 10^{-5}$ seconds. The recent proposal that the endpoint of gravitational collapse can be a "dark energy star" implies that the…
The standard model of cosmology posits that some time in the remote past, labelled as t=0, a Big-Bang occurred. However, it does not tell what caused the Big-Bang and subsequently the Inflation. In the present work the cause of the Big-Bang…
For two decades the hot big-bang model as been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not answered by the standard cosmology and…
We confront the big bang for the beginning of the universe with an equivalent picture of a slow freeze - a very cold and slowly evolving universe. In the freeze picture the masses of elementary particles increase and the gravitational…
Black holes are one of the most fascinating predictions of general relativity. They are the natural product of the complete gravitational collapse of matter and today we have a body of observational evidence supporting the existence of…
General relativity is a background-independent theory of a dynamical classical spacetime geometry. Quantum theory is formulated in a classical spacetime, as an intrinsically probabilistic, contextual theory of non-classical, interfering…
Our conventional understanding of space-time, as well as our notion of geometry, break down once we attempt to describe the very early stages of the evolution of our universe. The extreme physical conditions near the Big Bang necessitate an…
The Cyclic Model is a radical, new cosmological scenario which proposes that the Universe undergoes an endless sequence of epochs which begin with a `big bang' and end in a `big crunch.' When the Universe bounces from contraction to…
Problem of cosmological singularity of general relativity theory is discussed. The possible resolution of this problem in the framework of inflationary cosmology is proposed. Physical conditions leading to bouncing inflationary solutions in…
We study the homogeneous gravitational collapse of a spherical cloud of matter in a super-renormalizable and asymptotically free theory of gravity. We find a picture that differs substantially from the classical scenario. The central…
A unique description of the Big Crunch-Big Bang transition is given at the classical gravity level, along with a complete set of homogeneous, isotropic, analytic solutions in scalar-tensor cosmology, with radiation and curvature. All…
The Planck collaboration has provided us rich information about the early universe, and a host of new observational missions will soon shed further light on the `anomalies' that appear to exist on the largest angular scales. From a quantum…
In this paper we study possible observational consequences of the bouncing cosmology. We consider a model where a phase of inflation is preceded by a cosmic bounce. While we consider in this paper only that the bounce is due to loop quantum…
We explore the consequences of requiring that quantum theories of gravity be unitary, mostly focusing on simple cosmological models to illustrate the main points. We show that unitarity for a clock that encounters a classical singularity at…
We present a gauge-invariant treatment of singularity resolution using loop quantum gravity techniques with respect to local SU(2) transformations. Our analysis reveals many novel features of quantum geometry which were till now hidden in…
In generic models of cosmological inflation, quantum fluctuations strongly influence the spacetime metric and produce infinitely many regions where the end of inflation (reheating) is delayed until arbitrarily late times. The geometry of…
The gravitational force harbours a fundamental instability against collapse. In standard General Relativity without Quantum Mechanics, this implies the existence of black holes as natural, stable solutions of Einstein's equations. If one…
We present a rich class of exact solutions which contains radiation-dominated and matter-dominated models for the early and late universe. They include a variable cosmological ``constant'' which is derived from a higher dimension and…