Related papers: Quantum Effects in Cosmology
Understanding the behavior of the universe at large depends critically on insights about the smallest units of matter and their fundamental interactions. Inflationary cosmology is a highly successful framework for exploring these…
In a unified picture both inflation and present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a scale invariant "past fixed point" where all particles are massless, to a…
Fluctuation terms and higher moments of a quantum state imply corrections to the classical equations of motion that may have implications in early-universe cosmology, for instance in the state-dependent form of effective potentials. In…
This is a very comprehensible review of some key issues in Modern Cosmology. Simple mathematical examples and analogies are always used, whenever available. The starting point is the well know Big Bang Cosmology (BBC). We deal with the…
In this work, a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) universe with dust and a cosmological constant is quantized. By means of a canonical transformation, the classical Hamiltonian is reduced to that of either a harmonic oscillator or…
Cosmic inflation is arguably the most favoured paradigm of the very early Universe. It postulates an early phase of fast, nearly exponential, and accelerated expansion. Inflationary models are capable of explaining the overall flatness and…
Cosmological perturbations are generally described by quantum fields on (curved but) classical space-times. While this strategy has a large domain of validity, it can not be justified in the quantum gravity era where curvature and matter…
Quantum gravity places entirely new challenges on the formulation of a consistent theory as well as on an extraction of potentially observable effects. Quantum corrections due to the gravitational field are commonly expected to be tiny…
Attempts to apply quantum collapse theories to Cosmology and cosmic inflation are reviewed. These attempts are motivated by the fact that the theory of cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin suffers from the single outcome…
We find that general relativity can be naturally free of cosmological singularities. Several nonsingular models are currently available that either assume ad hoc matter contents, or are nonsingular only over a sector of solution space of…
This short review is addressed to cosmologists. General relativity predicts that space-time comes to an end and physics comes to a halt at the big-bang. Recent developments in loop quantum cosmology have shown that these predictions cannot…
The Planck collaboration has provided us rich information about the early universe, and a host of new observational missions will soon shed further light on the `anomalies' that appear to exist on the largest angular scales. From a quantum…
Quantum cosmology uses a wave function to model the universe, but finding solutions for this poses a problem as it is difficult to define the boundary conditions or identify the correct path for a path integral. We begin the discussion by…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
Since it is commonly believed that the observed large-scale structure of the Universe is an imprint of quantum fluctuations existing at the very early stage of its evolution, it is reasonable to pose the question: Do the effects of quantum…
Loop quantum cosmology homogeneous models with a massless scalar field show that the big-bang singularity can be replaced by a big quantum bounce. To gain further insight on the nature of this bounce, we study the semi-discrete loop quantum…
This thesis investigates cosmological particle production within Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetimes, both as a dark matter mechanism and through analog simulations using Bose-Einstein condensates. While a full theory of Quantum…
Observations indicate that the universe is effectively flat, but they do not rule out a closed universe. The role of positive curvature is negligible at late times, but can be crucial in the early universe. In particular, positive curvature…
This paper discusses the problem of inflation in the context of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Cosmology. We show how, after a simple change of variables, one can quantize the problem in a way which parallels the classical discussion. The…
We develop a quantum-cosmological framework in which the inflationary potential emerges from the structure of the wave function of the universe rather than being postulated. Starting from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for a flat…