Related papers: Geodesic completeness and homogeneity condition fo…
We study the issue of length renormalization in the context of fully covariant gravity theories as well as non-relativistic ones such as Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity. The difference of their symmetry groups implies a relation between the…
We study the accelerated expansion of the Universe through its consequences on a congruence of geodesics. We make use of the Raychaudhuri equation which describes the evolution of the expansion rate for a congruence of timelike or null…
In this article, we present a gravitational collapse null dust solution of the Einstein field equations. The spacetime is regular everywhere except on the symmetry axis where it possesses a naked curvature singularity, and admits one…
We study a generality of an inflationary scenario by integrating the Einstein equations numerically in a plane-symmetric spacetime. We consider the inhomogeneous spacetimes due to (i) localized gravitational waves with a positive…
Recent study has shown that a non-singular oscillating potential, a feature of Infinite Derivative Gravity (IDG) theories, matches current experimental data better than the standard GR potential. In this work we show that this non-singular…
Despite the extraordinary attention that modified gravity theories have attracted over the past decade, the geodesic deviation equation in this context has not received proper formulation thus far. This equation provides an elegant way to…
The geodesic deviation equation (`GDE') provides an elegant tool to investigate the timelike, null and spacelike structure of spacetime geometries. Here we employ the GDE to review these structures within the…
The discovery of the accelerated expansion of the universe highlighted General Relativity's inability to naturally account for dark energy without invoking a finely tuned cosmological constant. In response, a wide range of alternative…
In this work we study the local behavior of geodesics in the neighborhood of a curvature singularity contained in stationary and axially symmetric space-times. Apart from these properties, the metrics we shall focus on will also be required…
In this talk we discuss three different issues. First of all, there exist several proposals how to solve cosmological problems by adiabatic expansion of the Universe, without any use of inflation. We explain why these models do not solve…
It is argued that the spatial homogeneity of the early universe need not be explained as having evolved from a previous inhomogeneous state. Rather, a homogeneous cosmic initial condition follows from the Second Law of Thermodynamics…
We propose a phenomenological approach to the cosmological constant problem based on generally covariant non-local and acausal modifications of four-dimensional gravity at enormous distances. The effective Newton constant becomes very small…
The growth of large scale structure is a battle between gravitational attraction and cosmic acceleration. We investigate the future behavior of cosmic growth under both general relativity (GR) and modified gravity during prolonged…
Cosmological inflation and topological defects have been considered for a long time, either in disagreement or in competition. On the one hand an inflationary era is required to solve the shortcomings of the hot big bang model, while on the…
We prove global hyperbolicity of spacetimes under generic regularity conditions on the metric. We then show that these spacetimes are timelike and null geodesically complete if the gradient of the lapse and the extrinsic curvature $K$ are…
In the present work, we review some general aspects of modified gravity theories, investigating mathematical and physical properties and, more specifically, the feature of viable and realistic models able to reproduce the dark energy epoch…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
Several major open problems in cosmology, including the nature of inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, share a common structure: they involve spacetime-filling media with unknown microphysics, and can be probed so far only through their…
We address some issues of topological defect inflation. (1) We clarify the causal structure of an inflating magnetic monopole. The spacetime diagram shows explicitly that this model is free from the ``graceful exit'' problem, while the…
Current astronomical observations are successfully explained by the present cosmological paradigm based on the concordance model ($\Lambda_0$CDM + Inflation). However, such a scenario is composed of a heterogeneous mix of ingredients for…