Related papers: Study of cosmic backreaction on the future evoluti…
Homogeneous and isotropic cosmological models with ordinary matter and gravity predict slower expansion and shorter distances than observed. It is possible that this failure is due the known breakdown of homogeneity and isotropy related to…
With the era of precision cosmology upon us, and upcoming surveys expected to further improve the precision of our observations below the percent level, ensuring the accuracy of our theoretical cosmological model is of the utmost…
In the context of a homogeneous universe, we note that the appearance of aggressively expanding advanced life is geometrically similar to the process of nucleation and bubble growth in a first-order cosmological phase transition. We exploit…
This article looks at how inhomogeneous spacetime models may be significant for cosmology. First it looks at how the averaging process may affect large scale dynamics, with backreaction effects leading to effective contributions to the…
The non-linearity of Einstein's equations makes it possible for small-scale matter inhomogeneities to affect the Universe at cosmological distances. We study the size of such effects using a simple heuristic model that captures the most…
Using our recent proposal for defining gauge invariant averages we give a general-covariant formulation of the so-called cosmological "backreaction". Our effective covariant equations allow us to describe in explicitly gauge invariant form…
We construct high-precision models of the Universe that contain radiation, a cosmological constant, and periodically distributed inhomogeneous matter. The density contrasts in these models are allowed to be highly non-linear, and the…
As the Einstein equations are non-linear, spatial averaging and temporal evolution do not commute. Therefore, the evolution of the averaged universe is affected by inhomogeneities. It is, however, highly controversial how large these…
Averaging and evolving inhomogeneities are non-commuting operations. This implies the existence of deviations of an averaged model from the standard Friedmann-Lemaitre cosmologies. We quantify these deviations, encoded in a backreaction…
This thesis is mainly about how to set up and carry out in a physically meaningful way the idea of back-reaction, according to which dark energy could be an effective source. There are, broadly speaking, two distinct approaches. One is…
A mildly inhomogeneous universe with a cosmological constant may look like it contains evolving dark energy. We show that could be the case by modelling the inhomogeneities and their effects in three different ways: as clumped matter…
It is the common consensus that the expansion of a universe always slows down if the gravity provided by the energy sources therein is attractive and accordingly one needs to invoke dark energy as a source of anti-gravity for understanding…
No. It is simply not plausible that cosmic acceleration could arise within the context of general relativity from a back-reaction effect of inhomogeneities in our universe, without the presence of a cosmological constant or ``dark energy.''…
We revisit the causal backreaction paradigm, in which the need for Dark Energy is eliminated via the generation of an apparent cosmic acceleration from the causal flow of inhomogeneity information coming in towards each observer from…
A refined version of a recently introduced method for analysing the dynamics of an inhomogeneous irrotational dust universe is presented. A fully non-perturbative numerical computation of the time dependence of volume in this framework…
Recently, we have derived a novel and compact expression for how perturbations in the matter fields of the cosmological fluid can lead to deviations from the standard Friedmann equations. Remarkably, the dissipative damping of velocity…
In the context of second order perturbation theory, cosmological backreaction is seen to rescale both time and the scale factor. The issue of the homogeneous limit of long-wavelength perturbations is addressed and backreaction is quantified…
Cosmological backreaction corresponds to the effect of inhomogeneities of structure on the global expansion of the Universe. The main question surrounding this phenomenon is whether or not it is important enough to lead to measurable…
In the present article we have investigated a very natural question regarding the dynamics of the universe, namely, the possibility of its decelerating phase immediately after the present accelerating phase. To begin with, we have focused…
A phenomenological formalism is presented in which the apparent acceleration of the universe is generated by large-scale structure formation, thus eliminating the coincidence and magnitude fine-tuning problems of the Cosmological Constant…