Related papers: A Cosmic Microscope for the Preheating Era
It is shown that gravitating magnetic fields affect the evolution of curvature perturbations in a way that is reminiscent of a pristine non-adiabatic pressure fluctuation. The gauge-invariant evolution of curvature perturbations is used to…
If the COBE detection of CMB fluctuations is used to normalize the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations in a cold dark matter--dominated universe, early reionization is likely to result in a substantial diminution of primordial…
We show that dissipative effects have a significant impact on the evolution of cosmological scalar fields, leading to friction, entropy production and field fluctuations. We explicitly compute the dissipation coefficient for different…
One of the fundamental problems of modern cosmology is to explain the origin of all the matter and radiation in the Universe today. The inflationary model predicts that the oscillations of the scalar field at the end of inflation will…
We consider thermal effects in the propagation of gravitational waves on a cosmological background. In particular, we consider scalar field cosmologies and study gravitational modes near cosmological singularities. We point out that the…
In this thesis, we discuss several instances in which non-linear behaviour affects cosmological evolution in the early Universe. We begin by reviewing the standard cosmological model and the tools used to understand it theoretically and to…
Fluctuation and dissipation dynamics is examined at all temperature ranges for the general case of a background time evolving scalar field coupled to heavy intermediate quantum fields which in turn are coupled to light quantum fields. The…
We present the evolution of the full set of Einstein equations during preheating after inflation. We study a generic supersymmetric model of hybrid inflation, integrating fields and metric fluctuations in a 3-dimensional lattice. We take…
We study the non-Gaussianities generated by light axions, or compact scalar fields, during inflation. To correctly calculate their impact on primordial statistics, we will argue that it is necessary to account for the periodicity, or gauge…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…
We consider the interaction between perturbations in the inflaton and in the metric during the preheating phase in simple inflationary models. By numerically integrating the Einstein field equations we are able to gauge the impact of…
The peculiar motion of massive objects across the line of sight imprints a dipolar temperature anisotropy pattern on the cosmic microwave background known as the moving lens effect. This effect provides a unique probe of the transverse…
Our current understanding of the Universe is established through the pristine measurements of structure in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the distribution and shapes of galaxies tracing the large scale structure (LSS) of the…
Light crossing dark domain walls that source a top form coupled to gauge Chern--Simons terms mixing visible and dark $U(1)$ gauge fields generically converts into dark photons. The effect is entirely localized on the wall and requires no…
The temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background observed by COBE provide strong support for an inflationary phase in the early universe, below the GUT scale. We argue that a singlet field in a hidden sector of an effective…
In this paper we provide a prescription for obtaining a small non-Gaussianity and the observed dipole asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background radiation. The observations inevitably lead to multi-field inflationary dynamics, where each…
A generalization of the random fluid hydrodynamic fluctuation theory due to Landau and Lifshitz is applied to describe cosmological fluctuations in systems with radiation and scalar fields. The viscous pressures, parametrized in terms of…
These lecture notes cover mainly three connected topics. In the first part we give a detailed treatment of cosmological perturbation theory. The second part is devoted to cosmological inflation and the generation of primordial fluctuations.…
Primordial fluctuations in the cosmic density are usually assumed to take the form of a Gaussian random field that evolves under the action of gravitational instability. In the early stages, while they have low amplitude, the fluctuations…
In the presence of anisotropic cosmic expansions at global or local scale the equations of electrodynamics in expanding space-time are modified and presented here. A new effect should arise in regions of local anisotropic expansion in a…