Related papers: A Cosmic Microscope for the Preheating Era
We present a macroscopic model of the decay of a coherent classical scalar field into statistical fluctuations through the process of parametric amplification. We solve the field theory (henceforth,"microscopic") model to leading order in a…
The characteristics of the cosmic microwave background provide circumstantial evidence that the hot radiation-dominated epoch in the early universe was preceded by a period of inflationary expansion. Here, we show how a measurement of the…
General relativistic effects in the form of metric perturbations are usually neglected in the preheating era that follows inflation. We argue that in realistic multi-field models these effects are in fact crucial, and the fully coupled…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We extend the formalism to calculate non-Gaussianity of primordial curvature perturbations produced by preheating in the presence of a light scalar field. The calculation is carried out in the separate universe approximation using the…
In the framework of inflationary models with non-vacuum initial states for cosmological perturbations, we study non-Gaussian signatures on the cosmic microwave background radiation produced by a broken-scale-invariant model which…
It is widely accepted that the Universe underwent a period of thermal equilibrium at very early times. One expects a residue of this primordial state to be imprinted on the large scale structure of space time. In this paper we study the…
We consider a model of preheating where the coupling of the inflaton to the preheat field is modulated by an additional scalar field which is light during inflation. We establish that such a model produces the observed curvature…
We discuss the photoionization of the intergalactic medium by early formed quasars and propose a mechanism which could generate measurable temperature fluctuations $\delta_{T }~=~\Delta T/T$ of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Early…
Major advances in the observation and theory of cosmic microwave background anisotropies have opened up a new era in cosmology. This has encouraged the hope that the fundamental parameters of cosmology will be determined to high accuracy in…
We investigate the possible effects on the evolution of perturbations in the inflationary epoch due to short distance physics. We introduce a suitable non local action for the inflaton field, suggested by Noncommutative Geometry, and…
Upcoming searches for the stochastic background of inflationary gravitational waves (GWs) offer the exciting possibility to probe the evolution of our Universe prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis. In this spirit, we explore the sensitivity of…
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…
After cosmic inflation and before the transition to radiation domination, the cosmic energy density may have been dominated during an extended period by an oscillating massive scalar condensate. We show that during this period, sub-Hubble…
In this paper we study the effect of a magnetic field on the fluctuation spectrum of the cosmic microwave background. We find that upcoming measurements might give interesting bounds on large scale magnetic fields in the early Universe. If…
Preheating describes the stage of rapidly depositing the energy of cosmological scalar field into excitations of other light fields. This stage is characterized by exponential particle production due to the parametric resonance. We study…
If light scalar fields are present at the end of inflation, their non-equilibrium dynamics such as parametric resonance or a phase transition can produce non-Gaussian density perturbations. We show how these perturbations can be calculated…
We establish the equivalence between the quantum evolution of spatially homogeneous oscillations of a scalar field and that of an analogous classical system with certain random initial condition. We argue that this observation can be used…
In the last few decades, advances in observational cosmology have given us a standard model of cosmology. We know the content of the universe to within a few percent. With more ambitious experiments on the way, we hope to move beyond the…
Preheating can convert superhorizon fluctuations of light scalar fields present at the end of inflation into observable density perturbations. We show in detail how lattice field theory simulations and the separate universes approximation…