Related papers: Primordial cosmic fluctuations for variable gravit…
Both inflationary and ekpyrotic scenarios can account for the origin of the large scale structure of the universe. It is often said that detecting primordial gravitational waves is the key to distinguish both scenarios. We show that this is…
Assuming that the background geometry is filled with free gas consisting of matter and radiation and no phase transitions being occurred in the early Universe, we discuss the thermodynamics of this {\it closed} system using classical…
Modern astronomical observations in cosmology provide increasingly strong evidence that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Explanations of the cosmic acceleration within the framework of general relativity use the hypothesis…
We revisit the issue of ripples in the primordial power spectra caused by trans-Planckian physics, and the potential for their detection by future cosmological probes. We find that for reasonably large values of the first slow-roll…
We present a novel mechanism to generate the cosmic perturbation from evaporation of primordial black holes. A mass of a field is fluctuated if it is given by a vacuum expectation value of a light scalar field because of the quantum…
We present a new approach to early universe cosmology. Inflation is replaced by a phase transition in which both matter and geometry are created simultaneously. We calculate the spectrum of metric perturbations and show that it is flat. We…
The ``trans-Planckian'' challenge in cosmology appears when we trace the present physical wavelengths of fluctuations backwards in time. They become smaller and smaller until crossing the Planck scale where conventional QFT is challenged,…
We revise the statistical properties of the primordial cosmological density anisotropies that, at the time of matter radiation equality, seeded the gravitational development of large scale structures in the, otherwise, homogeneous and…
We discuss the gravitational wave background generated by primordial density perturbations evolving during the radiation era. At second-order in a perturbative expansion, density fluctuations produce gravitational waves. We calculate the…
Quantum diffusion describes the inflow of vacuum quantum fluctuations as they get amplified by gravitational instability, and stretched to large distances during inflation. In this picture, the dynamics of the universe's expansion becomes…
The intimate geometry of space-time is expected to suffer stochastic fluctuations as a result of quantum gravitational effects. These fluctuations may induce observable consequences on the propagation of high energy particles over large…
The primordial spectrum of cosmological tensor perturbations is considered as a possible probe of quantum gravity effects. Together with string theory, loop quantum gravity is one of the most promising frameworks to study quantum effects in…
A particular form for the quantum indeterminacy of relative spacetime position of events is derived from the limits of measurement possible with Planck wavelength radiation. The indeterminacy predicts fluctuations from a classically defined…
The time evolution of primordial fluctuations conceals a wealth of insights into the high-energy physics at play during the earliest moments of our Universe, which is ultimately encoded in late-time spatial correlation functions. However,…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
Future cosmic microwave background polarization experiments will search for evidence of primordial tensor modes at large angular scales, in the multipole range $4 \leq \ell \leq 50.$ Because in that range there is some mild evidence of…
The thermal plasma induces a plasmon-like mass shift for gravitational perturbations, which can modify their dynamics near the horizon scale in the early radiation-dominated universe. However, there are several seemingly reasonable ways to…
Our Universe is nearly spatially flat, but this does not mean that it is exactly spatially flat. In this paper we derive general quadratic actions for cosmological perturbations in non-flat models from the Horndeski theory. This allows us…
The production of a stochastic background of gravitational waves is a fundamental prediction of any cosmological inflationary model. The features of such a signal encode unique information about the physics of the Early Universe and beyond,…
We point out that the standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem itself is problematic since it is trying to apply the very large scale homogeneous cosmological model to very small (Planck) scale phenomenon. At small scales,…