Related papers: Homogeneity and the causal boundary

It is commonly stated that we have entered the era of precision cosmology in which a number of important observations have reached a degree of precision, and a level of agreement with theory, that is comparable with many Earth-based physics…

In this paper, we study the characteristic scale of transition to cosmic homogeneity of the universe, $\mathcal{R}_H$, as a standard ruler, to constrain cosmological parameters on mock galaxy catalogues. We use mock galaxy catalogues that…

Observational constraints guide one forcefully to examine models in which the matter density is substantially less than critical density. Particularly noteworthy are those which are consistent with inflation. For these models, microwave…

We reexamine the cosmological constant problem in a finite temperature setup and propose an intriguing possibility of carrying out perturbative analysis by employing a renormalization scheme in which the renormalized Higgs mass (or resummed…

Using the exact Lemaitre-Bondi-Tolman solution with a non-vanishing cosmological constant $\Lambda$, we investigate how the presence of a local spherically-symmetric inhomogeneity can affect apparent cosmological observables, such as the…

Given there has been something where a big-bang origin of our evolutionary cosmos took place: What is the relativistic line element describing the energy density and pressure of such a pre-existing universal background? The simplest…

Several attempts to solve the cosmological constant problem, which concerns the value of the cosmological constant being extremely smaller than the Standard Model mass scales, have introduced a scalar field with a very flat potential that…

I try to revive, and possibly reconcile, a debate started a few years ago, about the relative roles of a bare cosmological constant and of a vacuum energy, by taking the attitude to try to get the most from the physics now available as…

We consider the standard model with local scale invariance. The theory shows exact scale invariance of dimensionally regulated action. We show that massless gauge fields, which may be abelian or non-abelian, lead to vanishing contribution…

Astrophysical observations provide a picture of the universe as a 4-dim homogeneous and isotropic flat space-time dominated by an unknown form of dark energy. To achieve such a cosmology one has to consider in the early universe an…

In standard cosmology, the cosmic homogeneity scale is the transition scale above which the patterns arising from non-uniformities -- such as groups and clusters of galaxies, voids, and filaments -- become indistinguishable from a random…

Based on a thoeretical model in which scalar fields play crucial roles, we propose a mechanism to better understand a cosmological constant expected to be small (nearly comparable with the critical density) but nonzero as suggested strongly…

I discuss the Hubble parameter $H_0$, the age of the universe $t_0$, the density $\Omega_0$, and the cosmological constant $\Lambda$. To focus the discussion, I concentrate on the issue of the value of the density $\Omega_0$ in currently…

We explore the possibility of describing our universe with a singularity--free, closed, spatially homogeneous and isotropic cosmological model, using only general relativity and a suitable equation of state which produces an inflationary…

We have shown that the phenomenological models with a cosmological constant of the type $\Lambda=\beta(\frac{\ddot R}{R})$ and $\Lambda=3\alpha H^2$, where $R$ is the scale factor of the universe and $H$ is the Hubble constant, are…

The cosmological constant $(1/2)\lambda_{1}\phi_{, \mu}\phi ^{, \mu}/\phi ^{2}$ is introduced to the generalized scalar-tensor theory of gravitation with the coupling function $\omega (\phi)=\eta /(\xi -2)$ and the Machian cosmological…

We review observational tests for the homogeneity of the Universe on large scales. Redshift and peculiar velocity surveys, radio sources, the X-Ray Background, the Lyman-alpha forest and the Cosmic Microwave Background are used to set…

We observe that the standard homogeneous cosmologies, those of Minkowski, de Sitter, and anti-de Sitter, which form the matrix for the Robertson--Walker scale factor, live naturally as isolated points inside a larger family of conformally…

The apparent accelerating expansion of the Universe is forcing us to examine the foundational aspects of the standard model of cosmology -- in particular, the fact that dark energy is a direct consequence of the homogeneity assumption. We…

Within the quantum mechanical treatment of the decay problem one finds that at late times $t$ the survival probability of an unstable state cannot have the form of an exponentially decreasing function of time $t$ but it has an inverse…