Related papers: Trans-Planckian Issues for Inflationary Cosmology
Inflation can act as a space-time microscope for Planck or string scale effects, leaving potentially observable traces in the primordial perturbation spectrum. I discuss two frameworks that were used recently to study this phenomenon:…
Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…
It has been proposed that the successful inflationary description of density perturbations on cosmological scales is sensitive to the details of physics at extremely high (trans-Planckian) energies. We test this proposal by examining how…
Though predictions of the simplest inflationary cosmological models with cold dark matter, flat space and approximately flat initial spectrum of adiabatic perturbations are remarkably close to observational data, we have to go beyond them…
In the standard inflationary paradigm the inhomogeneities observed in the CMB arise from quantum fluctuations of an initially homogeneous and isotropic vacuum state. This picture suffers from two well-known weaknesses. First, it assumes…
We investigate whether a recently proposed modulation of the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations generated through transplankian (maybe stringy) effects during inflation can be observed. We briefly review the mechanism leading…
We review the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture that stems from the Trans-Planckian problem of cosmological perturbations. We analyze the implications and constraints that TCC introduces in different frameworks of…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
We discuss the additional perturbation introduced during inflation by quantum stress tensor fluctuations of a conformally invariant field such as the photon. We consider both a kinematical model, which deals only with the expansion…
Recently Hollands and Wald argued that inflation does not solve any of the major cosmological problems. We explain why we disagree with their arguments. They also proposed a new speculative mechanism of generation of density perturbations.…
The torsion of spacetime, if exists, plays an important role at the very early universe when the spin density of particles was very high. It is generally believed that in extremely high energies of the early universe a new physics called…
The possibility that the scale-invariant inflationary spectrum may be modified due to the hidden assumptions about the Planck scale physics -- dubbed as trans-Planckian inflation -- has received considerable attention. To mimic the possible…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
We study inflationary dynamics within the framework of fractal cosmology, where space is characterized by an effective non-integer dimension $D$. In our work, fractal effects are sourced through thermodynamic modifications at the…
When the different wavelengths of the scalar and tensor modes of the geometry are all assigned on the same space-like hypersurface the maximally amplified frequencies of the spectrum remain smaller than the Planck mass only if the duration…
We develop a possible cosmology for a Universe with n additional spatial dimensions of variable scale, and an associated scalar field, the radion, which is distinct from the field responsible for inflation, the inflaton. Based on a…
We consider cosmological scenarios in which density perturbations are generated by the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field at early times; the late time dynamics involves a modulus which first dominates the energy density of the…
Within a broad class of inflationary models we critically analyze the way initial quantum fluctuations on a new-physics hypersurface (NPH) affect standard predictions for large-scale cosmological perturbations. We find that these so-called…
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…
Dynamics of the inflaton scalar field oscillating around a minimum of the singular potentials in the expanding Universe is investigated. Asymptotic formulas are obtained describing the cosmological expansion at the late times. The problem…