Related papers: What is the shape of the initial state?
According to the inflationary scenario for the very early Universe, all inhomogeneities in the Universe are of genuine quantum origin. On the other hand, looking at these inhomogeneities and measuring them, clearly no specific quantum…
I discuss how parameters describing inflation in the very early universe may be related to primordial perturbation spectra. Precision observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) such as those provided by the WMAP…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…
An introductory account is given of the modern understanding of the physics of the early Universe. Particular emphasis is placed on the paradigm of cosmological inflation, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the…
The intricate machinery of perturbative quantum field theory has largely been devoted to the 'dynamical' side of the theory: simple states are evolved in complicated ways. This article begins to address this lopsided treatment. Although it…
The era of precision cosmology has allowed us to accurately determine many important cosmological parameters, in particular via the CMB. Confronting Loop Quantum Cosmology with these observations provides us with a powerful test of the…
Little is known about the microscopic physics that gave rise to inflation in our universe. There are many reasons to wonder if the underlying description requires a careful arrangement of ingredients or if inflation was the result of an…
We propose a method to probe the equation of state of the early universe and its evolution, using the stochastic gravitational wave background from inflation. A small deviation from purely radiation dominated universe ($w= 1/3$) would be…
We clarify the way in which cosmological perturbations of quantum origin, produced during inflation, assume classical properties. Two features play an important role in this process: First, the dynamics of fluctuations which are presently…
Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in the past decade. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and,…
A brief review of the modern state of quantum cosmology is presented as a theory of quantum initial conditions for inflationary scenario. The no-boundary and tunneling states of the Universe are discussed as a possible source of probability…
In spite of the strong observational evidence suggesting a period of rapid expansion in the early universe, the identity of the inflaton field that drove this expansion remains elusive. Many inflaton candidate particles (both known and…
An effective description of an initial state is a method for representing the signatures of new physics in the short-distance structure of a quantum state. The expectation value of the energy-momentum tensor for a field in such a state…
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…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
Inflationary models, especially those with plateau-type potentials, are consistent with the cosmological data, but inflation itself does not resolve the initial singularity. This singularity is resolved, for example, by the idea of the…
A recent variant of the inflationary paradigm is that the ``primordial'' curvature perturbations come from quantum fluctuations of a scalar field, subdominant and effectively massless during inflation, called the ``curvaton'', instead of…
We give a new interpretation of the effect of initial state entanglement on the spectrum of vacuum fluctuations. We consider an initially entangled state between two free massive scalar fields in de Sitter space. We construct the initial…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…