Related papers: Cosmic Topology
The accelerating expansion of the Universe poses a major challenge to our understanding of fundamental physics. One promising avenue is to modify general relativity and obtain a new description of the gravitational force. Because…
Some of the basic concepts of topology are explored through known physics problems. This helps us in two ways, one, in motivating the definitions and the concepts, and two, in showing that topological analysis leads to a clearer…
This paper clarifies some aspects of Lorentzian topology change, and it extends to a wider class of spacetimes previous results of Geroch and Tipler that show that topology change is only to be had at a price. The scenarios studied here are…
Curvature is a key notion in General Relativity, characterizing the local physical properties of spacetime. By contrast, the concept of curvature has received scant attention in nonperturbative quantum gravity. One may even wonder whether…
We challenge the widely held belief that the cosmological principle is an obvious consequence of the observed isotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation, combined with the Copernican principle. We perform a detailed analysis of a…
Much of modern cosmology relies on the Cosmological Principle, the assumption that the Universe is isotropic and homogeneous on sufficiently large scales, but it remains worthwhile to examine cosmological models that violate this principle…
Current theories of particle physics lead to the unavoidable conclusion that there must have been several phase transitions in the early universe. Further, in the context of these theories, it is possible that cosmological phase transitions…
Cosmography represents an important branch of cosmology which aims to describe the universe without the need of postulating \emph{a priori} any particular cosmological model. All quantities of interest are expanded as a Taylor series around…
With the beginning of the XXIst century, a physical model of our Universe, usually called the Standard Cosmological Model (SCM), is reaching an important level of consolidation, based on accurate astrophysical data and also on theoretical…
In a recent paper (Vigoureux et al. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 47:928, 2007) it has been suggested that the velocity of light and the expansion of the universe are two aspects of one single concept connecting space and time in the expanding…
Using the idea of the degree of a smooth mapping between two manifolds of the same dimension we present here the topological (homotopical) classification of the mappings between spheres of the same dimension, vector fields, monopole and…
We present an elementary account of mathematical cosmology through a series of important unsolved problems. We introduce the fundamental notion of `a cosmology' and focus on the issue of singularities as a theme unifying many current,…
An elementary survey of mathematical cosmology is presented. We cover certain key ideas and developments in a qualitative way, from the time of the Einstein static universe in 1917 until today. We divide our presentation into four main…
By virtue of harmonic maps on two-dimensional spheres (S$^{2}$), a topological quantization in spacetime is proposed. The discrete character of all physical quantities follows naturally. A Schwarzschild black hole, non-black hole and…
Cosmology is built on a relativistic understanding of gravity, where the geometry of the Universe is dynamically determined by matter and energy. In the cosmological concordance model, gravity is described by General Relativity, and it is…
What is the shape of the Universe? Is it finite or infinite ? Is space multi-connected to create ghost images of faraway cosmic sources? After a "dark age" period, the field of cosmic topology has now become one of the major concerns in…
As a point of departure it is suggested that Quantum Cosmology is a topological concept independent from metrical constraints. Methods of continuous topological evolution and topological thermodynamics are used to construct a cosmological…
Loop Quantum Gravity is a background independent, nonperturbative approach to the quantization of General Relativity. Its application to models of interest in cosmology and astrophysics, known as Loop Quantum Cosmology, has led to new and…
Modern cosmology relies on the assumption of large-scale isotropy and homogeneity of the Universe. However, locally the Universe is inhomogeneous and anisotropic. So, how can local measurements (at the 100 Mpc scale) be used to determine…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamical interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields). The unreduced interaction analysis avoiding any perturbative model gives…