Related papers: Uniform gradient expansions
Methods and concepts for the study of phase transitions mediated by a time-dependent order-parameter field in curved spacetimes are discussed. A practical example is the derivation of an effective (quasi-)potential for the description of…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
While cosmological inflation can erase primordial inhomogeneities, it is possible that inflation may not begin in a significantly inhomogeneous universe. This issue is particularly pressing in multifield scenarios, where even the…
Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of inflation and dark energy in terms of a single scalar degree of freedom, the cosmon. We present here a comprehensive overview of this appealing paradigm, highlighting its key…
We develop the gradient expansion formalism for shift-symmetric Galileon-type actions. We focus on backgrounds that undergo inflation, work in the synchronous gauge, and obtain a general solution up to second order without imposing extra…
A general overview of the history and present status of inflationary cosmology is given. Recent developments discussed in this paper include the hybrid inflation scenario, the theory of reheating, and the theory of inflating tolopogical…
The homogeneous cosmological model in GR is proposed, where the vacuum energy, which can cause the inflation, is described by tensor field rather than by commonly used in inflationary scenarios scalar field. It is shown that if the initial…
Effective field theories in flat space and in anti-de Sitter space are constrained by causality and unitarity, often in the form of positivity bounds. Similar bounds have been harder to demonstrate in cosmological backgrounds, where the…
An outgrowth of the idea of inflation is advanced. In the inflation regime, the singularity condition is broken. Equations which govern inflation are invariant under time reversal, so that they describe deflation as well. Those two…
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
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…
The present paper tries to answer the question: Can a de Sitter phase in presence of radiation be a competitor of the standard inflationary paradigm for the early universe? This kind of a de Sitter phase can exist in cosmological models…
The usual description of inflationary fluctuations uses the framework of quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, in which quantum fluctuations are superimposed on a classical background spacetime. Even for large fluctuations, such…
Viable models of modified gravity which satisfy both local as well as cosmological tests are investigated. It is demonstrated that some versions of such highly non-linear models exhibit multiply de Sitter universe solutions, which often…
We discuss the cosmological evolution of a scalar field with non standard kinetic term in terms of a Renormalization Group Equation (RGE). In this framework inflation corresponds to the slow evolution in a neighborhood of a fixed point and…
We present a unified evolution of the universe from very early times until the present epoch by including both the leading local correction $R^2$ and the leading non-local term $R\frac{1}{\square^2}R$ to the classical gravitational action.…
Using the dS/QFT correspondence in the context of inflation allows for the study of interesting, otherwise inaccessible physics. In particular, by studying inflation via its dual field theory at the boundary of the de Sitter space, it may…