Related papers: The world is discrete
In this paper, we calculate the spectrum of scalar field fluctuations in a bouncing, asymptotically flat Universe, and investigate the dependence of the result on changes in the physics on length scales shorter than the Planck length which…
The study of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is progressing at a phenomenal rate, both experimentally and theoretically. These anisotropies can teach us an enormous amount about the way that fluctuations were…
The cosmological observations of cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure indicate that our universe has a nearly scaling invariant power spectrum of the primordial perturbation. However, the exact origin for this primordial…
We investigate the hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background on small angular scales. We find an anomalously high asymmetry in the multipole range l=601-2048, with a naive statistical significance of 6.5 sigma.…
Full-sky maps of the cosmic microwave background temperature reveal a 7% asymmetry of fluctuation power between two halves of the sky. A common phenomenological model for this asymmetry is an overall dipole modulation of statistically…
The discovery of scale acceleration evidenced from supernovae luminosities and spatial flatness of feature evolution in the cosmic microwave background presents a challenge to the understanding of the evolution of cosmological vacuum…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
One of the best motivated hypotheses in cosmology states that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of weakly-interacting massive particles that decoupled early in the history of the universe and cooled adiabatically to an…
The large-scale structure of the universe suggests that the physics underlying its early evolution is scale-free. This was the historic motivation for the Harrison-Zel'dovich-Peebles spectrum and for inflation. Based on a hydrodynamical…
Cosmic strings are topological defects possibly formed in the early Universe, which may be observable due to their gravitational effects on the cosmic microwave background radiation or gravitational wave experiments. To this effect it is…
Detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background indicate the large-scale homogeneity of the universe. On very small scales, we observe however inhomogeneities such as galaxies, stars, planets and ourselves. In the context of hot…
Open Inflation has recently been suggested as a possible way out of the age crisis caused by observations of a large rate of expansion of the universe, in conflict with the existence of very old globular clusters. It proposes that our local…
The recently measured cutoff, k_min=[4.34(+/-)0.50]/r_cmb (with r_cmb the comoving distance to the last scattering surface), in the fluctuation spectrum of the cosmic microwave background, appears to disfavor slow-roll inflation and the…
The fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are investigated for a small open universe, i.e., one which is periodically composed of a small fundamental cell. The evolution of initial metric perturbations is computed using the…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
We examine the squeezed limit of the bispectrum when a light scalar with arbitrary non-derivative self-interactions is coupled to the inflaton. We find that when the hidden sector scalar is sufficiently light ($m\lesssim0.1\,H$), the…
A Planck scale inflationary era -- in a quantum gravity theory predicting discreteness of quantum geometry at the fundamental scale -- produces the scale invariant spectrum of inhomogeneities with very small tensor-to-scalar ratio of…
We revisit the physics of transitions from a general equation of state parameter to the final stage of slow-roll inflation. We show that it is unlikely for the modes comprising the cosmic microwave background to contain imprints from a…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
We assume that the origin of the electroweak (EW) scale is a gauge-invariant scalar-bilinear condensation in a strongly interacting non-abelian gauge sector, which is connected to the standard model via a Higgs portal coupling. The…