Related papers: Galilean Islands in Eternally Inflating Background
The pseudo-conformal universe is an alternative to inflation in which the early universe is described by a conformal field theory on approximately flat space-time. The fields develop time-dependent expectation values, spontaneously breaking…
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 present a nonsingular scenario in which an inflation era goes after a bounce from a contracting scenario in the early universe. The contracting of the universe is supposed to be slow, such that the initial anisotropies will not grow too…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
Inflationary models usually assume the existence of scalar fields or other exotic gravitational sources. We investigate an alternative approach in which the entire Universe is considered as a thermodynamic system described by…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
In this paper we consider the implications of the "landscape" paradigm for the large scale properties of the universe. The most direct implication of a rich landscape is that our local universe was born in a tunnelling event from a…
We develop our recent suggestion that inflation may be made past eternal, so that there is no initial cosmological singularity or "beginning of time". Inflation with multiple vacua generically approaches a steady-state statistical…
We develop a quantum-cosmological framework in which the inflationary potential emerges from the structure of the wave function of the universe rather than being postulated. Starting from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for a flat…
We give a consistent description of how the inflationary Universe emerges in quantum cosmology. This involves two steps: Firstly, it is shown that a sensible probability peak can be obtained from the cosmological wave function. This is…
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe may be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In the…
We propose a new class of inflationary solutions to the standard cosmological problems (horizon, flatness, monopole,...), based on a modification of old inflation. These models do not require a potential which satisfies the normal…
It is shown that the inflationary era in early universe is realized due to the effect of backreaction of quantized matter fields. In fact we start by quantizing a free scalar field in the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker space-time, and the field…
From a model-building perspective, the inflationary sector might very well have no direct couplings to other species, apart from inevitable gravitational interactions. Within the context of General Relativity, a thermal universe can still…
We investigate the post-inflationary evolution of a non-minimally coupled inflaton field in scalar-tensor theories, framed within the flexible framework of Einstein-Cartan gravity. By focusing on a class of simplified Higgs-like scenarios,…
Cosmological singularities are often discussed by means of a gradient expansion that can also describe, during a quasi-de Sitter phase, the progressive suppression of curvature inhomogeneities. While the inflationary event horizon is being…
In this paper we investigate a model of an inflationary universe in Kaluza-Klein theory, which is a four-dimensional de Sitter space plus a one-dimensional compactified internal space. We find that the energy scale for inflation can be…
We consider multiverse models in two-dimensional linear dilaton-gravity theories as toy models of false vacuum eternal inflation. Coupling conformal matter we calculate the Von Neumann entropy of subregions. When these are sufficiently…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
In the framework of a flat Friedmann-Lema{\^\i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) geometry, we present a nonsingular model (no big bang singularity at finite time) of our universe describing its evolution starting from its early inflationary era…