Related papers: Analyzing Cosmic Bubble Collisions
While cosmological inflation can erase primordial inhomogeneities, it is possible that inflation may not begin in a significantly inhomogeneous universe. This issue is particularly pressing in multifield scenarios, where even the…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
The pre-big-bang cosmology inspired by superstring theories has been suggested as an alternative to slow-roll inflation. We analyze, in both the Jordan and Einstein frames, the effect of spatial curvature on this scenario and show that too…
We study bubble-wall dynamics in cosmological first-order phase transitions in a two-scalar-field model, where the wall is formed by $\phi$ and an additional real scalar $s$ couples through a portal interaction. We evolve the coupled…
A scenario with two subsequent periods of inflationary expansion in the very early universe is examined. The model is based on a potential motivated by symmetries being found in field theory at high energy. For various parameter sets of the…
We develop in this thesis the principles governing the production of our universe's primordial inhomogeneities during its early phase of inflation. As a guiding thread we ask what physics during inflation can lead to perturbations so large…
We obtain cosmological constraints on models of inflation which exhibit rapid roll solutions. Rapid roll attractors exist for potentials with large mass terms and are thus of interest for inflationary model building within string theory. We…
We revisit the study of the phenomenology associated to a burst of particle production of a field whose mass is controlled by the inflaton field and vanishes at one given instance during inflation. This generates a bump in the correlators…
In inflationary cosmology, cosmic reheating after inflation sets the initial conditions for the hot big bang. We investigate how CMB data can be used to study the effective potential and couplings of the inflaton during reheating and…
Motivated by the lessons of black hole complementarity, we develop a causal patch description of eternal inflation. We argue that an observer cannot ascribe a semiclassical geometry to regions outside his horizon, because the large-scale…
The mechanism of thermal inflation, a relatively short period of accelerated expansion after primordial inflation, is a desirable ingredient for a certain class of particle physics models if they are not to be in contention with the…
We analyse numerically the onset of pre-big bang inflation in an inhomogeneous, spherically symmetric Universe. Adding a small dilatonic perturbation to a trivial (Milne) background, we find that suitable regions of space undergo…
It was recently proposed that five-dimensional inflation can relate the causal size of the observable universe to the present weakness of gravitational interactions by blowing up an extra compact dimension from the microscopic fundamental…
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…
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…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
We consider the effects of the curvaton, late-decaying scalar condensation, to observational constraints on inflation models. From current observations of cosmic density fluctuations, severe constraints on some class of inflation models are…
If time-dependent disruptions from slow-roll occur during inflation, the correlation functions of the primordial curvature perturbation should have scale-dependent features, a case which is marginally supported from the cosmic microwave…
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…
Many models of supersymmetry breaking involve particles with weak scale mass and Planck mass suppressed couplings. Coherent production of such particles in the early universe destroys the successful predictions of nucleosynthesis. We show…