Related papers: Generating matter inhomogeneities in general relat…
In this dissertation, we look at environmental effects in extreme and intermediate mass ratio inspirals into massive black holes. In these systems, stellar mass compact objects orbit massive black holes and lose orbital energy due to…
Despite being created through a fundamentally quantum-mechanical process, cosmological structures have not yet revealed any sign of genuine quantum correlations. Among the obstructions to the direct detection of quantum signatures in…
We study the symmetries enjoyed by the Newtonian equations of motion of the non-relativistic dark matter fluid coupled to gravity which give rise to the phenomenon of gravitational instability. We also discuss some consistency relations…
There are two kinds of quantum fluctuations relevant to cosmology that we focus on in this article: those that form the seeds for structure formation in the early universe and those giving rise to Boltzmann brains in the late universe.…
Turbulence may have been produced in the early universe during several kind of non-equilibrium processes. Periods of cosmic turbulence may have left a detectable relic in the form of stochastic backgrounds of gravitational waves. In this…
Extension of particle symmetry implies new conserved charges and the lightest particles, possessing such charges, should be stable. Created in early Universe, stable charged heavy leptons and quarks can exist and, hidden in elusive atoms…
It is believed that classical behavior emerges in a quantum system due to decoherence. It has also been proposed that gravity can be a source of this decoherence. We examine this in detail by studying a number of quantum systems, including…
We describe a new mechanism - radiatively-induced gravitational leptogenesis - for generating the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. We show how quantum loop effects in C and CP violating theories cause matter and antimatter to…
The origin of seed perturbations in the Universe is studied within the framework of a specific minisuperspace model. It is shown that the `creation' of the Universe as a result of a quantum transition from a flat empty spacetime would lead…
We present a new scenario for the development of the Universe after the Big Bang, built on the conjecture that a vast majority of the primordial quark matter did not undergo a phase transition to normal nuclear matter, but rather split up…
We study the gravitational production of super-Hubble-mass dark matter in the very early universe. We first review the simplest scenario where dark matter is produced mainly during slow roll inflation. Then we move on to consider the cases…
Effects of the quantum gravity under Minkowski space-time background are considered. It is shown that despite the absence of the complete theory of quantum gravity, some concrete predictions could be made for the influence of the quantum…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
We propose a new out-of-equilibrium production mechanism of light dark matter: resonance scanning. If the dark matter mass evolved in the early Universe, resonant production may have occurred for a wide range of light dark matter masses…
For general relativistic spacetimes filled with irrotational `dust' a generalized form of Friedmann's equations for an `effective' expansion factor $a_D (t)$ of inhomogeneous cosmologies is derived. Contrary to the standard Friedmann…
If the Universe's energy density was dominated by a fast-rolling scalar field while the radiation bath was hot enough to thermally produce dark matter, then dark matter with larger-than-canonical annihilation cross sections can generate the…
A mildly inhomogeneous universe with a cosmological constant may look like it contains evolving dark energy. We show that could be the case by modelling the inhomogeneities and their effects in three different ways: as clumped matter…
One possibility to explain the current accelerated expansion of the universe may be related with the presence of cosmologically evolving scalar whose mass depends on the local matter density (chameleon cosmology). We point out that matter…
The formation and evolution of Black Holes inevitably affects the distribution of dark and baryonic matter in the neighborhood of the Black Hole. These effects may be particularly relevant around Supermassive and Intermediate Mass Black…
We discuss effects of loss of coherence in low energy quantum systems caused by or related to gravitation, referred to as gravitational decoherence. These effects, resulting from random metric fluctuations, for instance, promise to be…