Related papers: Conformal Invariance, Dynamical Dark Energy and th…
The trace anomaly for a conformally invariant scalar field theory on a curved manifold of positive constant curvature with boundary is considered. In the context of a perturbative evaluation of the theory's effective action explicit…
We explore the large angular scale temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) due to homogeneous local dust-filled voids in a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe with a cosmological constant. In comparison with…
Gravitation is described in the context of a dilatonic theory that is conformally related to general relativity. All dimensionless ratios of fundamental dimensional quantities, e.g. particle masses and the Planck mass, as well as the…
We investigate the role played by symmetries in the perturbative expansion of the large-scale structure. In particular, we establish which of the coefficients of the perturbation theory kernels are dictated by symmetries and which not. Up…
Cosmological perturbations of sufficiently long wavelength admit a fluid dynamic description. We consider modes with wavevectors below a scale $k_m$ for which the dynamics is only mildly non-linear. The leading effect of modes above that…
The standard cosmological model, which assumes statistical isotropy and parity invariance, predicts the absence of correlations between even-parity and odd-parity observables of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Contrary to these…
The instability of (quasi) de Sitter spacetime from quantum gravitational effects has been discussed in many works. Especially, the gravitational backreaction from quantum energy momentum tensor is crucial for understanding the low-energy…
I review and update ideas about the quantum theory of de Sitter space. New results include a quantum relation between energy and entropy of states in the causal patch, which is satisfied by small dS black holes. I also discuss the…
Conformality is the idea that at TeV scales enrichment of the standard model particle spectrum leads to conformal invariance at a fixed point of the renormalization group. Some aspects of conformality in particle phenomenology and cosmology…
To guarantee the stability of the cosmological constant sector against radiative corrections coming from quantum matter fields, one of the most natural ingredients to invoke is the symmetry under scale transformations of the gravitational…
In cosmological scenarios such as the pre-big bang scenario or the ekpyrotic scenario, a matching condition between the metric perturbations in the pre-big bang phase and those in the post big-bang phase is often assumed. Various matching…
The damping of primordial perturbations at small scales gives rise to distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Here, the dependence of the distortion on the different types of cosmological initial conditions is explored,…
For a certain type of modified dispersion relations, the vacuum quantum state for very short wavelength cosmological perturbations is scale-invariant and it has been suggested that this may be the source of the scale-invariance observed in…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) power spectrum derived from the first year WMAP data demonstrates an intriguing lack of power at large scales that cannot be accounted for within the framework of the standard cosmological model. We…
The quantization of the massless minimally coupled (mmc) scalar field in de Sitter spacetime is known to be a non-trivial problem due to the appearance of strong infrared (IR) effects. In particular, the scale-invariance of the CMB…
Every locally normal representation of a local chiral conformal quantum theory is covariant with respect to global conformal transformations, if this theory is diffeomorphism covariant in its vacuum representation. The unitary, strongly…
The requirements of conformal invariance for two and three point functions for general dimension $d$ on flat space are investigated. A compact group theoretic construction of the three point function for arbitrary spin fields is presented…
We demonstrate that local, scale-dependent non-Gaussianity can generate cosmic variance uncertainty in the observed spectral index of primordial curvature perturbations. In a universe much larger than our current Hubble volume, locally…
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…
An overview is presented of a recently proposed "radically conservative" solution to the problem of dark energy in cosmology. The proposal yields a model universe which appears to be quantitatively viable, in terms of its fit to supernovae…