Related papers: Cosmic Bubble Collisions
Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension---the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation---which…
I describe the features and general properties of bouncing models and the evolution of cosmological perturbations on such backgrounds. I will outline possible observational consequences of the existence of a bounce in the primordial…
Within the context of a first-order phase transition in the early Universe, we study the collision process for vacuum bubbles expanding in a plasma. The effects of the plasma are simulated by introducing a damping term in the equations of…
We discuss a possible scenario to induce a bubble universe using buildable bubbles. First, we observe that if there is no violation of the null energy condition, all bubbles are buildable and do not have inflation if their initial…
We consider the possibility of a past and future eternal universe, constructing geodesically complete inflating, loitering, and bouncing spacetimes. We identify the constraints energy conditions in General Relativity place on the building…
This short review is addressed to cosmologists. General relativity predicts that space-time comes to an end and physics comes to a halt at the big-bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology have shown that these predictions cannot…
Topical phenomena in high-energy physics related to collision experiments of heavy nuclei ("Little Bang") and early universe cosmology ("Big Bang") involve far-from-equilibrium dynamics described by quantum field theory. One example…
We consider a cosmological model in which our Universe is a spherically symmetric bubble wall in 5-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime. We argue that the bubble on which we live will undergo collisions with other similar bubbles and…
An appealing theory is that our current patch of universe was born as a nucleation bubble from a phase of false vacuum eternal inflation. We search for evidence for this theory by looking for the signal imprinted on the CMB that is…
Our local Hubble volume might be contained within a bubble that nucleated in a false vacuum with only two large spatial dimensions. We study bubble collisions in this scenario and find that they generate gravity waves, which are made…
In the context of eternal inflation we discuss the fate of Lambda = 0 bubbles when they collide with Lambda < 0 crunching bubbles. When the Lambda = 0 bubble is supersymmetric, it is not completely destroyed by collisions. If the domain…
Cosmological inflation, if it occurred, radically alters the picture of the `big bang', which would merely point to reheating at the end of inflation. Moreover, this reheating may be only local, so that inflation continues elsewhere and…
We discuss cosmological models for an eternal universe. Physical observables show no singularity from the infinite past to the infinite future. While the universe is evolving, there is no beginning and no end - the universe exists forever.…
A basic modern picture of the universe is given here. The lectures start from the historical ideas of a static universe. Then I move on to Newtonian cosmology and derive the main cosmological equations in the framework of Newtonian…
I review the current status of the theory of Cosmic Inflation. My discussion covers the motivation and implementation of the idea, as well as an analysis of recent successes and open questions. There is a special discussion of the physics…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
In first-order inflation a phase transition is completed by the collisions of expanding true-vacuum bubbles. If bubble collisions produce large numbers of soft scalar particles carrying quantum numbers associated with a spontaneously broken…
We review the status of bouncing cosmologies as alternatives to cosmological inflation for providing a description of the very early universe, and a source for the cosmological perturbations which are observed today. We focus on the…
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 bubble universe collisions in the ultrarelativistic limit with the new feature of allowing for nontrivial curvature in field space. We establish a simple geometrical interpretation of such collisions in terms of a double family of…