Related papers: Is the Big Rip unreachable?
Gas giants are thought to form by runaway accretion: an instability driven by the self-gravity of growing atmospheres that causes accretion rates to rise super-linearly with planet mass. Why runaway should stop at a Jupiter or any other…
Experimental study of the anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is gathering momentum. The eagerly awaited Boomerang results have lived up to expectations. They provide convincing evidence in favor of the standard paradigm:…
We study the possibility that large scale cosmological perturbations have been generated during the domination and decay of a massive particle species whose mass depends on the expectation value of a light scalar field. We discuss the…
We propose a scenario for inflation based upon the braneworld picture, in which high-energy corrections to the Friedmann equation permit inflation to take place with potentials ordinarily too steep to sustain it. Inflation ends when the…
We calculate the probability distribution for the volume of the Universe after slow-roll inflation both in the eternal and in the non-eternal regime. Far from the eternal regime the probability distribution for the number of e-foldings,…
We examine nonrelativistic particles that decay into relativistic products in big rip, little rip, and pseudo-rip models for the future evolution of the universe. In contrast to decays that occur in standard $\Lambda$CDM, the evolution of…
Extended theories of gravity have gathered a lot of attention over the last years, for they not only provide an excellent framework to describe the inflationary era but also yields an alternative to the elusive and mysterious dark energy.…
All species of (non-conformally-coupled) particles are produced during inflation so long as their mass $M$ is not too much larger than $H$, the expansion rate during inflation. It has been shown that if a particle species that is normally…
There are many reasons to believe the present mass density of the universe is dominated by a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP), a fossil relic of the early universe. Theoretical ideas and experimental efforts have focused mostly on…
Dense enough compact objects were recently shown to lead to an exponentially fast increase of the vacuum energy density for some free scalar fields properly coupled to the spacetime curvature as a consequence of a tachyonic-like…
Massive gravity is a modified theory of general relativity. In this paper, we study, using a method in which the scale factor changes as a particle in a "potential", all possible cosmic evolutions in a ghost-free massive gravity. We find…
Whether our universe with present day acceleration can eventually collapse is very interesting problem. We are also interesting in such problems, whether the universe is closed? Why it is so flat? How long to expend a period for a cycle of…
It has been claimed in several papers that a phantom energy-dominated universe can undergo a ``big trip'', i.e., tunneling through a wormhole that grows faster than the cosmic substratum due to the accretion of phantom energy, and will…
The coupling between spin and torsion in the Einstein-Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity generates gravitational repulsion at very high densities, which prevents a singularity in a black hole and may create there a new universe. We show…
We summarize three recent efforts to constrain the first few moments of cosmic creation before and during the epoch of inflation. We consider two means to explain a slight dip in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background for…
We analyse the emergent cosmological dynamics corresponding to the mean field hydrodynamics of quantum gravity condensates, in the tensorial group field theory formalism. We focus in particular on the cosmological effects of fundamental…
The spectrum of created particles during the tunneling process, leading to the decay of a false vacuum state, is studied numerically in the thick-wall approximation. It is shown that in this case the particle production is very intensive…
The theory of reheating of the Universe after inflation is developed. The transition from inflation to the hot Universe turns out to be strongly model-dependent and typically consists of several stages. Immediately after inflation the field…
The ekpyrotic and cyclic universe scenarios have revived the idea that the density perturbations apparent in today's universe could have been generated in a `pre-singularity' epoch before the big bang. These scenarios provide explicit…
We show that the inclusion of backreaction of massive long wavelengths imposes dynamical constraints on the allowed phase space of initial conditions for inflation, which results in a superselection rule for the initial conditions. Only…