Related papers: Observational Consequences of a Landscape: Epilogu…
If the current acceleration of our Universe is due to a cosmological constant, then a Coleman-De Luccia bubble will nucleate in our Universe. In this work, we consider that our observations could be likely in this framework, consisting in…
In the picture of eternal inflation as driven by a scalar potential with multiple minima, our observable universe resides inside one of many bubbles formed from transitions out of a false vacuum. These bubbles necessarily collide, upsetting…
We extend our previous work on the cosmology of Coleman-de Luccia bubble collisions. Within a set of approximations we calculate the effects on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as seen from inside a bubble which has undergone such a…
Cosmic bubble collisions provide an important possible observational window on the dynamics of eternal inflation. In eternal inflation, our observable universe is contained in one of many bubbles formed from an inflating metastable vacuum.…
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…
We evaluate the possibility of observable effects arising from collisions between vacuum bubbles in a universe undergoing false-vacuum eternal inflation. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that under certain assumptions most positions…
We analyze the cosmological signatures visible to an observer in a Coleman-de Luccia bubble when another such bubble collides with it. We use a gluing procedure to generalize the results of Freivogel, Horowitz, and Shenker to the case of a…
We develop a set of controlled, analytic approximations to study the effects of bubble collisions on cosmology. We expand the initial perturbation to the inflaton field caused by the collision in a general power series, and determine its…
Eternal inflation predicts our observable universe lies within a bubble (or pocket universe) embedded in a volume of inflating space. The interior of the bubble undergoes inflation and standard cosmology, while the bubble walls expand…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
Observational tests during the next decade may determine if the evolution of the Universe can be understood from fundamental physical principles, or if special initial conditions, coincidences, and new, untestable physical laws must be…
The 2.725 K cosmic microwave background has played a key role in the development of modern cosmology by providing a solid observational foundation for constraining possible theories of what happened at very large redshifts and theoretical…
Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension--the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation--which…
In this paper we consider the implications of the "landscape" paradigm for the large scale properties of the universe. The most direct implication of a rich landscape is that our local universe was born in a tunnelling event from a…
In this paper we study possible observational consequences of the bouncing cosmology. We consider a model where a phase of inflation is preceded by a cosmic bounce. While we consider in this paper only that the bounce is due to loop quantum…
This paper is the third in a series investigating the possibility that if we reside in an inflationary "bubble universe", we might observe the effects of collisions with other such bubbles. Here, we study the interior structure of a bubble…
Recent results from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments verify several of the predictions of inflation, while ruling out a number of alternative structure-formation scenarios. Given the successes of the theory, the obvious next…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
Inflation as the leading paradigm depicting the very early universe physics could leave imprints on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Using currently available CMB observations, we give the tightest constraints on inflation…
The status of quantum cosmologies as testable models of the early universe is assessed in the context of inflation. While traditional Wheeler-DeWitt quantization is unable to produce sizable effects in the cosmic microwave background, the…