Related papers: Cycles in the Multiverse
In a universe dominated by a small cosmological constant or by eternal dark energy with equation of state w < -1/3, observers are surrounded by event horizons. The horizons limit how much of the universe the observers can ever access. We…
An introductory account is given of the modern understanding of the physics of the early Universe. Particular emphasis is placed on the paradigm of cosmological inflation, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the…
We consider an inflationary universe scenario with multiple stages of inflation. The primary inflation, which may start at the Planck epoch, is followed by secondary inflations, which include the cosmological inflation that causes the…
We investigate how various inflationary and bouncing cosmologies can be realized by imperfect fluids with a generalized equation of state, in the context of both classical and loop quantum cosmology. With regards to the inflationary…
This is the third paper in a series establishing a quantitative relation between inflationary scalar field potential landscapes and the relic perturbations left by the collision between bubbles produced during eternal inflation. We…
In a previous paper \cite{MakingPredictions}, a method of comparing the volumes of thermalized regions in eternally inflating universe was introduced. In this paper, we investigate the dependence of the results obtained through that method…
A continuous process of creation of particles is investigated as a possible connection between the inflationary stage with late cosmic acceleration. In this model, the inflationary era occurs due to a continuous and fast process of creation…
In a unified picture both inflation and present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a scale invariant "past fixed point" where all particles are massless, to a…
Eternally inflating universes can contain large thermalized regions with different values of the constants of Nature and with different density fluctuation spectra. To find the probability for a `typical' observer to detect a certain set of…
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
We propose a model for cosmic inflation which is based on an effective description of strongly interacting, nonsupersymmetric matter within the framework of dynamical Abelian projection and centerization. The underlying gauge symmetry is…
Eternal inflation arising from a potential landscape predicts that our universe is one realization of many possible cosmological histories. One way to access different cosmological histories is via the nucleation of bubble universes from a…
As a result of discussions with Bousso and Vilenkin I want to return to the question of whether the multiverse is past-eternal or if there was a beginning. Not surprisingly, given three people, there were three answers. However, the…
We perform a semi-classical analysis of the Emergent Universe scenario for inflation. Fixing the background, and taking the inflaton to be homogenous, we cast the inflaton's evolution as a one-dimensional quantum mechanics problem. We find…
Understanding the behavior of the universe at large depends critically on insights about the smallest units of matter and their fundamental interactions. Inflationary cosmology is a highly successful framework for exploring these…
We revisit an inflationary scenario in which primordial inhomogeneities arise from a quantum collapse, a stochastic mechanism described in the context of quantum collapse theories in its continuous version and within semiclassical gravity.…
The purpose of these lectures is to give a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the production of primordial perturbations, as well as a review of some of the latest developments in this domain. After a short introduction, we review…
Although the inflationary paradigm is the most widely accepted explanation for the current cosmological observations, it does not necessarily correspond to what actually happened in the early stages of our Universe. To decide on this issue,…