Related papers: Constraining Quantum Initial Conditions before Inf…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
We consider the behaviour of a quintessence field during an inflationary epoch, in order to learn how inflation influences the likely initial conditions for quintessence. We use the stochastic inflation formalism to study quantum…
String theory gives rise to various mechanisms to generate primordial inflation, of which ``brane inflation'' is one of the most widely considered. In this scenario, inflation takes place while two branes are approaching each other, and the…
I give a brief review of the status of research on the nature of initial conditions required to obtain a period of cosmological inflation. It is shown that there is good evidence that in the case of large field models, the inflationary…
We investigate the primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) in the general scenario where the inflation is preceded by a pre-inflationary stage with the effective equation of state $w$. Comparing with the results in the usual inflationary…
In a primordial universe pre(post)-inflationary era , there could be phases of early universe made of cold gas baryons, radiation and early post inflationary cosmological constant. I showed that in the baryonic epoch, the quantum vacuum is…
The primordial Universe can be used as a laboratory to set constraints on quantum gravity. In the framework of Loop Quantum Cosmology, we show that such a proposal for quantum gravity not only solves for the big bang singularity issue but…
There exist a one complex parameter family of de Sitter invariant vacua, known as alpha vacua. In the context of slow roll inflation, we show that all but the Bunch-Davies vacuum generates unacceptable production of high energy particles at…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
Within the framework of inflationary models that incorporate a spontaneous reduction of the wave function for the emergence of the seeds of cosmic structure, we study the effects on the primordial scalar power spectrum by choosing a novel…
The initial condition problem of inflation is examined from the perspective of both spacetime embedding and scalar field dynamics. The spacetime embedding problem is solved for arbitrary initial spatial curvature Omega, which generalizes…
The Big Bang singularity in standard model cosmology suggests a program of study in 'early universe' quantum gravity phenomenology. Inflation is usually thought to undermine this program's prospects by means of a dynamical diluting…
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.…
This note is a summary of the work reported in hep-th/9801073. We give a brief discussion of the fine tuning problem in pre-big bang cosmology. We use the flatness problem as our test case, and in addition to the exact numerical limits on…
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…
We study the implications of the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for early universe cosmology and in particular inflationary cosmology. The TCC leads to the conclusion that if we want inflationary cosmology to…
The epoch when the Universe had a temperature higher than a GeV is long before any time at which we have reliable observations constraining the cosmological evolution. For example, the occurrence of a second burst of inflation (sometimes…
The capability of Cosmic Inflation to explain the latest Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation data is assessed by performing Bayesian model comparison within the landscape of nearly three-hundred models of…
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of the early and late accelerated phases of the Universe, linking the inflationary epoch to the present-day dark energy-dominated era through a single scalar degree of freedom. In this…
The temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as measured today, may offer key insights into the topology of the early universe prior to inflation, for example, by discriminating between flat and warped…