Related papers: Preinflationary Perturbations in The Thermal Backg…
The standard theoretical estimation of the thermal dark matter abundance may be significantly altered if properties of dark matter particles in the early universe and at the present cosmological epoch differ. This may happen if, e.g., a…
We investigate possible signatures of a pre-inflationary anisotropic phase in two-point and three-point correlation functions of the curvature perturbation for high-momentum modes which exit the horizon after isotropization. In this…
We update constraints on the Hubble function H(phi) during inflation, using the most recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large scale structure (LSS) data. Our main focus is on a comparison between various commonly used methods of…
In cosmological scenarios with thermal inflation, extra eras of moduli matter domination, thermal inflation and flaton matter domination exist between primordial inflation and the radiation domination of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. During…
The hypothesis that the Universe underwent a period of exponential expansion at very early times has become the most popular theory of the early Universe. Not only does it solve some of the problems of standard big bang cosmology, but it…
We describe an attempt to reconstruct the initial conditions for the formation of cosmological large-scale structure. The power spectrum of the primordial fluctuations is affected by bias, nonlinear evolution and redshift-space distortions,…
In this paper, the scalar and tensor perturbations in the closed algebra approach of loop quantum cosmology are studied. Instead of the distant past in the contracting phase, we choose the moment at which the initial conditions are imposed…
An investigation is undertaken into the properties and effects of a preinflationary era during at least part of which semiclassical gravity was valid. It is argued that if the Universe (or our part of it) was approximately homogeneous and…
We show that inflationary models with broken rotational invariance generate testable off-diagonal signatures in the correlation between the $\mu$-type distortion and temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background. More…
By quantizing the background as well as the perturbations in a simple one fluid cosmological model, we show that there exists an ambiguity in the choice of relevant variables, potentially leading to incompatible observational physical…
How sensitive are the predictions of inflation to pre-inflationary conditions when the number of efolds of inflation is not too large? In an attempt to address this question, we consider a simple model where the inflationary era is preceded…
This pedagogical review aims at presenting the fundamental aspects of the theory of inflationary cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. The analogy with the well-known Schwinger effect is discussed in detail and a…
The temperature anisotropies and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a window back to the physics of the early universe. They encode the nature of the initial fluctuations and so can reveal much about the…
Motivated by recent studies of the one-bubble inflationary scenario, simple open cold dark matter models are tested for consistency with cosmological observations. The initial perturbation spectrum is derived by solving for the evolution of…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
Cosmology requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and fields. What is the fundamental physics behind dark matter and dark energy? What generated the initial fluctuations in the early Universe? Polarised light…
We consider a simple system consisting of matter, radiation and vacuum components to model the impact of thermal inflation on the evolution of primordial perturbations. The vacuum energy magnifies the primordial modes entering the horizon…
We consider an inflationary universe model in which the phase of accelerated expansion was preceded by a non-singular bounce and a period of contraction which involves a phase of deceleration. We follow fluctuations which exit the Hubble…
We show that it is possible to simulate realistic inhomogeneities during cosmological inflation with high precision using {Numerical Relativity}. Stochastic initial conditions are set in line with the Bunch-Davies {vacuum} and satisfy the…
We provide the gauge-invariant expression for large-scale cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations at second-order in perturbation theory. It enables to unambiguously define the nonlinearity parameter f_NL which is used by…