Related papers: Spatial Curvature Falsifies Eternal Inflation
In inflation cosmologies, cosmic structure develops through the gravitational instability of the inevitable quantum noise in primordial scalar fields. I show how the acceleration of the universe defines the shape of the primordial spectrum…
Cosmic inflation, a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe, can give rise to large amplitude ultra-large scale inhomogeneities on distance scales comparable to or larger than the observable universe. The cosmic microwave…
A model of cosmological inflation is proposed in which field space is a hyperbolic plane. The inflaton never slow-rolls, and instead orbits the bottom of the potential, buoyed by a centrifugal force. Though initial velocities redshift away…
A simple model of uniformly expanding, homogeneous Universe with a bulk viscosity is studied wherein the inflationary density decays due to viscous dissipation during the expansion phase of the Universe. The model is shown to generate the…
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…
In the context of eternal inflation, cosmological predictions depend on the choice of measure to regulate the diverging spacetime volume. The spectrum of inflationary perturbations is no exception, as we demonstrate by comparing the…
Inflation predicts that the Universe is spatially flat. The Planck 2018 measurements of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy favour a spatially closed universe at more than 2$\sigma$ confidence level. We use model independent methods…
Models are developed to estimate properties of relic cosmic perturbations with "spooky" nonlocal correlations on the inflationary horizon, analogous to those previously posited for information on black hole event horizons. Scalar curvature…
It was pointed out previously~\cite{Kinney:2014jya} that a sufficiently negative running of the spectral index of curvature perturbations from (ordinary i.e. cold) inflation is able to prevent eternal inflation from ever occurring. Here, we…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting…
We explore a broad class of three-parameter inflationary models, called the $\Lambda$-inflation, and its observational predictions: high abundance of cosmic gravitational waves consistent with the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum of primordial…
It seems generic to have vacua with lower dimensionality than ours. We consider the possibility that the observable universe originated in a transition from one of these vacua. Such a universe has anisotropic spatial curvature. This may be…
We examine all-sky cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature maps on large angular scales to compare their consistency with two scenarios: the standard inflationary quantum picture, and a distribution constrained to have a universal…
Models of cosmic inflation posit an early phase of accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields in curved spacetime. Though detailed assumptions about fields and couplings vary across models,…
An alternative inflationary model is proposed predicated upon a consideration of the form of the uncertainty principle in a curved background spacetime. An argument is presented suggesting a possible curvature dependence in the correct…
Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…
The standard model of cosmology assumes a homogeneous and isotropic universe that undergoes a period of exponential expansion very early on, named inflation. This stretches quantum fluctuations from the onset of inflation to cosmological…
Inflationary theory predicts that the observable Universe should be very close to flat, with a spatial-curvature parameter |Omega_K| < 10^-4. The WMAP satellite currently constrains |Omega_K| < 0.01, and the Planck satellite will be…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…