Related papers: Predicting a Prior for Planck
The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…
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…
The appearance of peaks in various primordial fluctuation Fourier power spectra is a generic prediction of the inflationary scenario. We investigate whether future experiments, in particular the satellite experiment PLANCK, will be able to…
Current measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropy power spectra of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) seem to indicate that the naive expectation for the slow-roll hierarchy within the most simple inflationary paradigm…
We analyze a quantized toy model of a universe undergoing eternal inflation using a quantum-field-theoretical formulation of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This so-called third quantization method leads to the picture that the eternally…
We forecast the ability of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization datasets to constrain theories of eternal inflation using cosmic bubble collisions. Using the Fisher matrix formalism, we determine both the overall…
An earlier paper points out that a quantum treatment of the string landscape is necessary. It suggests that the wavefunction of the universe is mobile in the landscape until the universe reaches a meta-stable site with its cosmological…
We review the constraints that the recently released Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Planck data put on inflation and we argue that single field slow-roll inflationary scenarios (with minimal kinetic term) are favored. Then, within this…
The observation of primordial gravitational waves could provide a new and unique window on the earliest moments in the history of the universe, and on possible new physics at energies many orders of magnitude beyond those accessible at…
Recent B-mode polarization observation seems to imply the tensor tilt $n_T\gtrsim 1$ at large angular scale, if the primordial signal is dominated. We show that for a primordial universe, which is in a slowly expanding genesis phase before…
Possibly, the most general action in the background of isotropic and homogeneous space-time has been considered to study the quantum evolution of the early universe, apart from a cosmological constant. The hermiticity of the effective…
Recent observations about the cosmic microwave background evidence a clear discrepancy between the scale of inflation and the Planck scale expected in the conventional inflationary picture, based on simple chaotic inflationary models. This…
The recently released BICEP2 data detected the primordial B-mode polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) map which strongly supports for a large tensor-to-scalar ratio, and thus, is found to be in tension with the Planck…
We provide an exhaustive numerical exploration of the predictions of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) with a post-bounce phase of inflation for the primordial power spectrum of scalar and tensor perturbations. We extend previous analysis by…
We investigate the observational signatures of many-field inflation and present analytic expressions for the spectral index as a function of the prior. For a given prior we employ the central limit theorem and the horizon crossing…
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…
A macroscopic universe may emerge naturally from a Planck cell fluctuation by unfolding through a stage of exponential expansion towards a homogeneous cosmological background. Such primordial inflation requires a large and presumably…
Making cosmological predictions in a multiverse is a fundamental theoretical challenge. Assuming that (quasi-)de Sitter vacua are quantum mechanically described by a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, we develop a detailed framework for…
Cosmologists have embraced a particular ad hoc formula for the primordial power spectrum from inflation for universes with $\Omega_0 < 1$. However, the so-called ``Open Inflation'' models, which are attracting renewed interest in the…
In this Letter, we study analytically the evolutions of the flat Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) universe and its linear perturbations in the framework of {\em the dressed metric approach} in loop quantum cosmology (LQC).…