Related papers: Connections between Minkowski and Cosmological Cor…
In this paper, we show that Minkowski Functionals (MFs) of weak gravitational lensing (WL) convergence maps contain significant non-Gaussian, cosmology-dependent information. To do this, we use a large suite of cosmological ray-tracing…
A particularly attractive feature of inflation is that quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field may have seeded inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the formation of large-scale structure. In this paper, we…
We reconsider the fine-tuning problem of scalar-driven inflation arising from the need to couple the inflaton to ordinary matter in order to make reheating efficient. Quantum fluctuations of this matter induce Coleman-Weinberg corrections…
The space of inflationary models is vast, containing wide varieties of mechanisms, symmetries, and spectra of particles. Consequently, the space of observational signatures is similarly complex. Hence, it is natural to look for boundaries…
We study gravity coupled to a cosmological constant and a scale but not conformally invariant sector. In Minkowski vacuum, scale invariance is spontaneously broken. We consider small fluctuations around the Minkowski vacuum. At the…
Recent theoretical work has revealed that basic observables of quantum field theory in de Sitter space, known as in-in or cosmological correlators, exhibit surprisingly simple mathematical structure reminiscent of scattering amplitudes in…
We construct a class of single small field models of inflation that can predict, contrary to popular wisdom, an observable gravitational wave signal in the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. The spectral index, its running, the…
We prove that in the Hartle-Hawking approach to quantum cosmology the existence of an inflationary phase is a general property of minisuperspace models given by a closed Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe containing a massless scalar field…
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…
We apply Minkowski functionals and various derived measures to decipher the morphological properties of large-scale structure seen in simulations of gravitational evolution. Minkowski functionals of isodensity contours serve as tools to…
We consider toy cosmological models in which a classical, homogeneous, spinor field provides a dominant or sub-dominant contribution to the energy-momentum tensor of a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe. We find that, if such a field…
Phase-space descriptions are used to find qualitative features of the solutions of generalized scalar field cosmologies with arbitrary potentials and arbitrary couplings to matter. Previous results are summarized and new ones are presented…
We derive discontinuity relations, also known as cutting rules, and explore the analytic properties of cosmological correlators, fundamental observables of the primordial universe. Our emphasis is on how these relations arise from unitarity…
At momenta much higher than the Hubble scale, the cosmological expansion can be thought of as a weak gravitational field. We consider QFT in a particularly convenient set of coordinates that makes this manifest, so that, for those high…
Cosmological correlation functions of inflaton and graviton perturbations are the fundamental observables of early universe cosmology and remain a primary target for observations. In this work, we ask the following question: are these…
Quantum effects play an essential role in modern cosmology. Perhaps the most striking example comes from large-scale structures, generally assumed to originate from vacuum quantum fluctuations and stretched by an expansion phase. Inflation…
Problem of cosmological singularity of general relativity theory is discussed. The possible resolution of this problem in the framework of inflationary cosmology is proposed. Physical conditions leading to bouncing inflationary solutions in…
We develop a reformulation of the functional integral for bosons in terms of bilocal fields. Correlation functions correspond to quantum probabilities instead of probability amplitudes. Discrete and continuous global symmetries can be…
We present a unified framework that simultaneously addresses the dynamics of early-time cosmic inflation and late-time cosmic acceleration within the context of a single scalar field non-minimally coupled to gravity. By employing an…
In a series of five lectures I review inflationary cosmology. I begin with a description of the initial conditions problems of the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) cosmology and then explain how inflation, an early period of accelerated…