Related papers: Particle Physics and the Cosmic Microwave Backgrou…
The theory of quantum thermodynamics investigates how the concepts of heat, work, and temperature can be carried over to the quantum realm, where fluctuations and randomness are fundamentally unavoidable. These lecture notes provide an…
If the universe is finite and smaller than the distance to the surface of last scatter, then the signature of the topology of the universe is writ large on the microwave background sky. We show that the microwave background will be…
Light fields with spatially varying backgrounds can modulate cosmic preheating, and imprint the nonlinear effects of preheating dynamics at tiny scales on large scale fluctuations. This provides us a unique probe into the preheating era…
The work is devoted to the investigations of possible observational manifestations of protoobjects related to "dark ages" epoch (10 < z < 1000), before formation of self-luminous galaxies and stars. These objects can distort the cosmic…
The status of quantum cosmologies as testable models of the early universe is assessed in the context of inflation. While traditional Wheeler-DeWitt quantization is unable to produce sizable effects in the cosmic microwave background, the…
The tremendous experimental progress in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy studies over the last few years has helped establish a standard paradigm for cosmology at intermediate epochs and has…
The upcoming satellite missions MAP and Planck will measure the spectrum of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background with unprecedented accuracy. We discuss the prospect of using these observations to distinguish among proposed…
Quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field in the early Universe, amplified by inflation, produce a primordial gravitational-wave background across a broad frequency band. We derive constraints on the spectrum of this gravitational…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a relict of the early universe. Its perfect 2.725K blackbody spectrum demonstrates that the universe underwent a hot, ionized early phase; its anisotropy (about 80 \mu K rms) provides strong evidence…
Particle phase transitions in the early universe including electroweak and grand unification ones are well-studied subjects. We point out that there are new possible particle phase transitions around inflation. Those new inflationary…
An initial state for the observable universe consisting of a finite region with a large vacuum energy will break-up due to near horizon quantum critical fluctuations. This will lead to a Friedmann-like early universe consisting of an…
Cosmological first-order phase transitions are a well-motivated source of stochastic gravitational waves (GWs), but most predictions are made based on the highly idealized model of perfectly spherical vacuum bubbles, neglecting thermal…
We study the effects of various phenomena which may have happened in the early universe on the spectrum of inflationary gravitational waves. The phenomena include phase transitions, entropy productions from non-relativistic matter, the…
We review a cosmology in which particles are fluctuationally created from a background Zero Point Field. This cosmology is consistent with recent observations of an ever expanding and accelerating universe, as also the recently confirmed…
The exploration of the rich dynamics of electrons is a frontier in fundamental nano-physics. The dynamical behavior of electrons is dominated by random and chaotic thermal motion with ultrafast ($\approx$ ps) and nanoscale scatterings. This…
A period of inflation in the early universe produces a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves over a huge range in wavelength. If the amplitude of this gravitational wave background is large enough to be detectable with…
It is shown that rotational cosmological perturbations can be generated in the early Universe, similarly to gravitational waves. The generating mechanism is quantum-mechanical in its nature, and the created perturbations should now be…
We investigate the ability to constrain oscillatory features in the primordial power spectrum using current and future cosmic microwave background observations. In particular, we study the observability of an oscillation arising from…
We study the effect of global topology of the spatial geometry on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for closed flat and closed hyperbolic models in which the spatial hypersurface is multiply connected. If the CMB temperature…
Scaling properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation are studied using satellite (COBE-DMR maps), balloon-borne and ground-based (combined QMASK map) data. Quantitative consistency is found between the multiscaling…