Related papers: The world is discrete
Observations of the microwave background fluctuations suggest a scale-dependent amplitude asymmetry of roughly 2.5 sigma significance. Inflationary explanations for this 'anomaly' require non-Gaussian fluctuations which couple observable…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
Most treatments of large scale anomalies in the microwave sky are a posteriori, with unquantified look-elsewhere effects. We contrast these with physical models of specific inhomogeneities in the early universe which then generate apparent…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…
A wide range of large scale observations hint towards possible modifications on the standard cosmological model which is based on a homogeneous and isotropic universe with a small cosmological constant and matter. These observations, also…
The lack of correlations at the long-wavelength scales of the cosmic microwave background spectrum is a long-standing puzzle and it persists in the latest Planck data. By considering the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary wave function as the…
Most of the analysis of the Cosmic Microwave Background relies on the assumption of statistical isotropy. However, given some recent evidence pointing against isotropy, as for instance the observed alignment of different multipoles on large…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
We present a bouncing cosmology which evolves from the contracting to the expanding phase in a smooth way, without developing instabilities or pathologies and remaining in the regime of validity of 4d effective field theory. A nearly scale…
We present our study on cosmic opacity, which relates to changes in photon number as photons travel from the source to the observer. Cosmic opacity may be caused by absorption/scattering due to matter in the universe, or by extragalactic…
We present a new version of holographic cosmology, which is compatible with present observations. A primordial $p=\rho$ phase of the universe is followed by a brief matter dominated era and a brief period of inflation, whose termination…
In the early Universe matter can be described as a conformal invariant ultra-relativistic perfect fluid, which does not contribute, on classical level, to the evolution of the isotropic and homogeneous metric. If we suppose that there is…
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…
We present a new insight into the interpretation of the primordial spectrum of scalar particles density perturbations. On the assumption of spectrum universality, i.e., that the mean energy density and the typical value of inhomogeneity can…
We examine the spectrum of inflaton fluctuations resulting from any given long period of exponential inflation. Infrared and ultraviolet divergences in the inflaton dispersion summed over all modes do not appear in our approach. We show how…
A network of cosmic strings (CS), if present, would continue emitting gravitational waves (GW) as it evolves throughout the history of the Universe. This results in a characteristic broad spectrum making it a perfect source to infer the…
We compute the power spectrum of curvature perturbations in stochastic inflation. This combines the distribution of first crossing times through the end-of-inflation surface, which has been previously studied, with the distribution of the…
This article describes the theory of cosmological perturbations around a homogeneous and anisotropic universe of the Bianchi I type. Starting from a general parameterisation of the perturbed spacetime a la Bardeen, a complete set of gauge…
We study the spectrum of loops as a part of a complete network of cosmic strings in flat spacetime. After a long transient regime, characterized by production of small loops at the scale of the initial conditions, it appears that a true…
Inflation may provide unique insight into the physics at the highest available energy scales that cannot be replicated in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Features in the primordial power spectrum are generically predicted in a wide…