Related papers: Inflation and CMB Anisotropy from Quantum Metric F…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
Quantum fluctuations during inflation may be responsible for temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Observations of CMB anisotropies can be used to falsify many currently popular models. In this paper we discuss…
We propose a cosmological lingering phase for the initial state prior to inflation which would help address the singularity problem of inflation. The universe begins with a constant (Hagedorn) temperature and then transitions into an…
Non-linear evolution of cosmological energy density fluctuations triggers deviations from Gaussianity in the temperature distribution of the cosmic microwave background. A method to estimate these deviations is proposed. N-body simulations…
Model independent arguments following from the Covariant Entropy Principle imply that causal diamonds in the very early universe were entirely filled with a single equilibrated system with finite entropy. A universe where this condition…
This paper discusses the problem of inflation in the context of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Cosmology. We show how, after a simple change of variables, one can quantize the problem in a way which parallels the classical discussion. The…
We consider a polymer quantization of a free massless scalar field in a homogeneous and isotropic cosmological spacetime. This quantization method assumes that field translations are fundamentally discrete, and is related to but distinct…
In this paper we consider the question of observational signatures of a false vacuum decay event in the early universe followed by a period of inflation; in particular, motivated by the string landscape, we consider decays in which the…
Prior to recombination, Silk damping causes the dissipation of energy from acoustic waves into the monopole of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), resulting in spectral distortions. These can be used to probe the primordial scalar power…
We investigate the evolution of a spatially flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe in the framework of scalar non-metricity theory of gravity. In the model, we consider dark matter (DM) and dark energy (DE) described by the scalar…
There is an apparent power deficit relative to the Lambda-CDM prediction of the CMB spectrum at large scales, which, though not yet statistically significant, persists from WMAP to Planck data. We first present a simple toy model…
We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The…
We argue that, under certain plausible assumptions, de Sitter space settles into a quiescent vacuum in which there are no dynamical quantum fluctuations. Such fluctuations require either an evolving microstate, or time-dependent histories…
Informed by a quantum information perspective, we interpret cosmological expansion of space as growing entanglement between underlying degrees of freedom. In particular, we focus on inflationary cosmology, which, while being a successful…
We investigate the cosmic variance of the skewness of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in an inflationary model which leads to the baryon isocurvature scenario for the cosmic structure formation. In this model, the baryon…
Inflation drives quantum fluctuations beyond the Hubble horizon, freezing them out before the small-scale modes re-enter during the radiation dominated epoch, and subsequently decay, while large-scale modes re-enter later during the matter…
There is an apparent power deficit relative to the $\Lambda$CDM prediction of the CMB spectrum at large scales, which, though not yet statistically significant, persists from WMAP to Planck data. Proposals that invoke some form of initial…
We investigate the $\phi^2$ inflationary model in the Bianchi-I spacetime using effective spacetime description of loop quantum cosmology to understand the issues of the resolution of initial singularity, isotropization, effect of…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
Cosmological inflation provides the simplest and most promising mechanism for generating fluctuations for structure formation. Using powerful Hamilton-Jacobi methods, I will describe (1) how to compute density fluctuations and cosmic…