Related papers: Cosmic Baldness
We address some issues of topological defect inflation. (1) We clarify the causal structure of an inflating magnetic monopole. The spacetime diagram shows explicitly that this model is free from the ``graceful exit'' problem, while the…
The decoherence of quantum fluctuations into classical perturbations during inflation is discussed. A simple quantum mechanical argument, using a spatial particle wavefunction rather than a field description, shows that observable…
In this paper we study the effects of spatial curvature of the metric on the phase space of vacuum $f(R)$ gravity. Particularly, we appropriately choose the variables of the dynamical system, in order for this to be autonomous, and we study…
We consider an additional fine-tuning problem which afflicts scalar-driven models of inflation. The problem is that successful reheating requires the inflaton be coupled to ordinary matter, and quantum fluctuations of this matter induces…
We show how, by considering the cumulative effect of tiny quantum gravitational fluctuations over very large distances, it may be possible to: ($a$) reconcile nucleosynthesis bounds on the density parameter of the Universe with the…
Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…
We argue that the presence of an inflationary epoch is a natural, almost unavoidable, consequence of the existence of a sensible effective action involving an infinite tower of higher-curvature corrections to the Einstein-Hilbert action. No…
A mechanism for suppressing the cosmological constant is described, using a superconducting analogy in which fermions coupled to gravitons are in an unstable false vauum. The coupling of the fermions to gravitons and a screened attractive…
We expand the Einstein-Hilbert action with a positive cosmological constant up to the fourth order in terms of gravity fluctuations, and then use the in-in formalism to calculate the four-point correlation function for gravitational waves,…
The question of geodesic completeness of cosmological spacetimes has recently received renewed scrutiny. A particularly interesting result is the observation that the well-known Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem may misdiagnose geodesically…
We study the effect of the scattering of gravitational waves on planetary motions, say the motion of the Moon around the Earth. Though this effect has a negligible influence on dissipation, it dominates fluctuations and the associated…
The study of gravitational waves in the presence of a cosmological constant has led to interesting forms of the de Sitter and anti-de Sitter line elements based on families of null hypersurfaces. The forms are interesting because they focus…
In the recent article Phys. Rev. D 100, no. 4, 043533 (2019) a compact phase space generalization of the flat de Sitter cosmology has been proposed. The main advantages of the compactification is that physical quantities are bounded, and…
Positive vacuum energy together with extra dimensions of space imply that our four-dimensional Universe is unstable, generically to decompactification of the extra dimensions. Either quantum tunneling or thermal fluctuations carry one past…
In this work we investigate the inflationary phenomenological implications of a recently developed ghost-free Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity. The resulting theory can be viewed as a scalar Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity, so by…
We show that in any model of non-eternal inflation satisfying the null energy condition, the area of the de Sitter horizon increases by at least one Planck unit in each inflationary e-folding. This observation gives an operational meaning…
There has been considerable interest over the past years in investigating the role of gravity in quantum phenomenon such as entanglement and decoherence. In particular, gravitational time dilation is believed to decohere superpositions of…
We study solutions of Einstein's equations corresponding codimension n>2 global topological defects with de Sitter slices. We analyze a class of solutions that are cylindrically symmetric and admit positive, negative or zero bulk…
The relative geodesic motion on $(1+3)$-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetimes is studied in terms of conserved quantities by adapting the Nachtmann boosting method created initially for the de Sitter spacetimes. In this approach the…
The predictive power of cosmic inflation hinges on the existence of a conserved quantity at very large scales, called the primordial curvature perturbation, which is therefore insensitive to the details of reheating and the physics of the…