Related papers: Cosmological Trans-Planckian Conjectures are not E…
Conventional approaches to cosmology inference from galaxy redshift surveys are based on n-point functions, which are under rigorous perturbative control on sufficiently large scales. Here, we present an alternative approach, which employs…
Effective field theories (EFTs) have been widely used as a framework in order to place constraints on the Planck suppressed Lorentz violations predicted by various models of quantum gravity. There are however technical problems in the EFT…
Cosmological inflation is not the only early universe scenario consistent with current observational data. I will discuss the criteria for a successful early universe cosmology, compare a couple of the proposed scenarios (inflation,…
Post-Newtonian theory was instrumental in conducting the critical experimental tests of general relativity and in building the astronomical ephemerides of celestial bodies in the solar system with an unparalleled precision. The cornerstone…
This paper presents a completely analytic treatment of cosmological fluctuations whose wavelength is small enough to come within the horizon well before the energy densities of matter and radiation become equal. This analysis yields a…
Holographic cosmology offers a novel framework for describing the very early Universe in which cosmological predictions are expressed in terms of the observables of a three dimensional quantum field theory (QFT). This framework includes…
We examine the constraints cosmological observations can place on any trans-Planckian corrections to the primordial spectrum of perturbations underlying the anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We focus on models of…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations effectively measure the basic properties of the universe during the recombination epoch. CMB measurements fix the distance to the surface of last scatter, the sound horizon of the…
I critically discuss a controversial 'trans-Planckian censorship' conjecture, which has recently been introduced to researchers working at the intersection of fundamental physics and cosmology. My focus explicitly avoids any appeals to…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
We investigate the potential of observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large-scale structure in the Universe to detect possible modifications of standard inflationary models by physics beyond the Planck…
We identify the effective theory describing inflationary super-Hubble scales and show it to be a special case of effective field theories appropriate to open systems. Open systems allow information to be exchanged between the degrees of…
The Planck scale is usually believed to be an unpassable wall. Putting a cutoff there and thinking of it as a quantized spacetime entity shows that. However, this is exactly the cause of many problems in quantum gravity. The cosmological…
Ballistic Macroscopic Fluctuation Theory (BMFT) captures the evolution of fluctuations and correlations in systems where transport is strictly ballistic. We show that, for \emph{generic integrable models}, BMFT can be constructed through a…
This paper presents an analysis of the smoothness problem in cosmology by focussing on the ambiguities originated in the simplifying hypotheses aimed at observationally verifying if the large-scale distribution of galaxies is homogeneous,…
We distinguish between the notions of asymptotic causality and infrared causality for gravitational effective field theories, and show that the latter gives constraints consistent with gravitational positivity bounds. We re-explore the…
A common ingredient in cosmological perturbation theory (PT) is the expansion of the dark matter overdensity $\delta$ in the Lagrangian displacement $s$, which amounts to enforcing mass conservation perturbatively. In Eulerian PT (EPT),…
The squeezed limit of the three-point function of cosmological perturbations is a powerful discriminant of different models of the early Universe. We present a conceptually simple and complete framework to relate any primordial bispectrum…
It is generally expected that quantum gravity affects the structure of space-time by introducing stochastic fluctuations in the geometry, and, ultimately, in the measurements of four-distances and four-momenta.These fluctuations may induce…
We investigate the possibility that electromagnetic fluctuations are amplified in expanding universe by parametric resonance, during the oscillatory regime of a scalar field to which they are coupled. We consider scalar electrodynamics and…