Related papers: Unavoidable shear from quantum fluctuations in con…
The trace of the stress-energy tensor of the cosmological fluid, proportional to the Ricci scalar curvature in general relativity, is determined on cosmic scales for times ranging from the inflationary epoch to the present day in the…
We discuss the appearance of time-asymmetric behavior in physical processes in cosmology and in the dynamics of the Universe itself. We begin with an analysis of the nature and origin of irreversibility in well-known physical processes such…
In homogeneous and isotropic loop quantum cosmology, gravity can behave repulsively at Planckian energy densities leading to the replacement of the big bang singularity with a big bounce. Yet in any bouncing scenario it is important to…
We show that the shear rate at a fixed shear stress in a micellar gel in a jammed state exhibits large fluctuations, showing positive and negative values, with the mean shear rate being positive. The resulting probability distribution…
The standard formulation of the cosmological constant problem is based on one critical assumption---the spacetime is homogeneous and isotropic, which is true only on cosmological scales. However, this problem is caused by extremely small…
We study the influence of the fluctuations of a Lorentz invariant and conserved vacuum on cosmological metric perturbations, and show that they generically blow up in the IR. We compute this effect using the K\"all\'en-Lehmann spectral…
In this work, we explore the effects of shear deformations in a wide class of holographic amorphous solids. It is found that both the shear stress and the complexity of formation grow with the increase of the shear strain. Notably, in the…
Ekpyrotic bouncing cosmologies have been proposed as alternatives to inflation. In these scenarios, the universe is smoothed and flattened during a period of slow contraction preceding the bounce while quantum fluctuations generate nearly…
We propose a new cosmological paradigm in which our observed expanding phase is originated from an initially large contracting Universe that subsequently experienced a bounce. This category of models, being geodesically complete, is…
The correlation between cosmic shear as measured by the image distortion of high-redshift galaxies and the number counts of foreground galaxies is calculated. For a given power spectrum of the cosmic density fluctuations, this correlation…
The shear strength of cohesionless granular materials is generally attributed to the compactness or anisotropy of their microstructure. An open issue is how such compact or anisotropic microstructures, and thus the shear strength, depend on…
We propose to use a simple observable, the fractional area of "hot spots" in weak lensing mass maps which are detected with high significance, to determine background cosmological parameters. Because these high-shear regions are directly…
Cosmic flexion, like cosmic shear, is a correlation function whose signal originates from the large-scale structure of the universe. Building on the observational success of cosmic shear, along with the unprecedented quality of large-scale…
We review several related investigations of the effects of the quantum stress tensor of a conformal field in inflationary cosmology. Particular attention will be paid to the effects of quantum stress tensor fluctuations as a source of…
Asymptotic (late-time) cosmology depends on the asymptotic (infinite-distance) limits of scalar field space in string theory. Such limits feature an exponentially decaying potential $V \sim \exp(- c \phi)$ with corresponding Hubble scale $H…
In order to investigate the origin of the ongoing tension between the amplitude of matter fluctuations measured by weak lensing experiments at low redshifts and the value inferred from the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, we…
It is proposed that if quantum states of space-time are coherent on null surfaces, holographic Planck-scale fluctuations of inflationary horizons dominate the formation of primordial scalar curvature perturbations. It is shown that the…
We study how the effects of quantum corrections lead to notions of irreversibility and clustering in quantum field theory. In particular, we consider the virtual ``charge" distribution generated by quantum corrections and adopt for it a…
We examine the anisotropy originated from a first-order vacuum phase transitions through three-dimensional numerical simulations. We apply Bianchi Type-I metric to our model that has one scalar field minimally coupled to the gravity. We…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…