Related papers: Predicting a Prior for Planck
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,…
The 2015 Planck data release has placed tight constraints on the class of in ationary models allowed. The current best fit region favors concave downwards in ationary potentials, since they produce a suppressed tensor to scalar index ratio…
Considering an arbitrary dimensional FLRW universe in the framework of a generalized S\'{a}ez--Ballester (SB) theory, we establish a noncommutative (NC) cosmological model. We concentrate on the predictions of NC model and compare them with…
It is often argued that inflation erases all the information about what took place before it started. Quantum gravity, relevant in the Planck era, seems therefore mostly impossible to probe with cosmological observations. In general, only…
A self-consistent pre-inflationary extension of the inflationary scenario with the Starobinsky potential, favored by Planck data, is studied using techniques from loop quantum cosmology (LQC). The results are compared with the quadratic…
A scenario with two subsequent periods of inflationary expansion in the very early universe is examined. The model is based on a potential motivated by symmetries being found in field theory at high energy. For various parameter sets of the…
We apply the principles of quantum mechanics and quantum cosmology to predict probabilities for our local observations of a universe undergoing false vacuum eternal inflation. At a sufficiently fine-grained level, histories of the universe…
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…
Oscillating massive fields in the primordial universe can be used as Standard Clocks. The ticks of these oscillations induce features in the density perturbations, which directly record the time evolution of the scale factor of the…
Inflationary cosmology with a preceding nonsingular bounce can lead to changes on the primordial density fluctuations. One significant prediction is that the amplitude of the power spectrum may undergo a jump at a critical scale. In this…
Observational missions have provided us with a reliable model of the evolution of the universe starting from the last scattering surface all the way to future infinity. Furthermore given a specific model of inflation, using quantum field…
We consider landscape models that admit several regions where the conditions for eternal inflation hold. It is shown that one can use the no-boundary wave function to calculate small departures from homogeneity within our past light cone…
In this work we explore the possibility of variations in the primordial scalar power spectrum around the power-law shape, as predicted by single-field slow-roll inflationary scenarios. We search for the trace of these fluctuations in a…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
Recently, the Planck 2013 results showed possible evidence for a dipolar power modulation of the CMB temperature fluctuations at low--(\ell) multipoles. This anomaly might imply certain deviations from statistical isotropy. To incorporate…
The inflationary and pre-inflationary evolution of scalar modes of cosmological perturbations in a closed universe is analyzed for a loop quantum cosmology model with an inflationary regime consistent with the constraints on inflation…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
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…
Based on the effective field theory (EFT) of nonsingular cosmologies, we build a stable model, without the ghost and gradient instabilities, of bounce inflation (inflation is preceded by a cosmological bounce). We perform a full simulation…
Within the inflationary scenario, Planck scale physics should have affected the comoving modes' initial conditions and early evolution, thereby potentially affecting the inflationary predictions for the cosmic microwave background (CMB).…