Related papers: Cosmic tangle: Loop quantum cosmology and CMB anom…
The expansion of our universe, when followed backward in time, implies that it emerged from a phase of huge density, the big bang. These stages are so extreme that classical general relativity combined with matter theories is not able to…
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 is traditionally formulated in a minisuperspace setting, implicitly averaging fields over space to obtain homogeneous models. For universal reasons related to the uncertainty principle, quantum corrections then depend on…
The goal of this article is to provide an overview of the current state of the art in loop quantum cosmology for three sets of audiences: young researchers interested in entering this area; the quantum gravity community in general; and,…
Quantum gravity has long been thought to be completely decoupled from experiments or observations. Although it is true that smoking guns are still missing, there are now serious hopes that quantum gravity phenomena might be tested. We…
This Chapter provides an up to date, pedagogical review of some of the most relevant advances in loop quantum cosmology. We review the quantization of homogeneous cosmological models, their singularity resolution and the formulation of…
It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant…
This brief article sums up the possible imprints of loop quantum gravity effects on the cosmological microwave background. We focus on semi-classical terms and show that "Big Bounce" corrections, together with the "pre Big Bounce" state,…
Quantum cosmology offers a unique stage to address questions of time related to its underlying (and perhaps truly quantum dynamical) meaning as well as its origin. Some of these issues can be analyzed with a general scheme of quantum…
In recent years, Loop Quantum Gravity has emerged as a solid candidate for a nonperturbative quantum theory of General Relativity. It is a background independent theory based on a description of the gravitational field in terms of…
The standard $\Lambda$CDM model of cosmology is largely successful in describing many observations, including precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. However, some intriguing anomalies remain currently…
Loop quantum gravity and cosmology are reviewed with an emphasis on evaluating the dynamics, rather than constructing it. The three crucial parts of such an analysis are (i) deriving effective equations, (ii) controlling the theory's…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background represent a remarkable source of information for modern cosmology. Besides providing impressive support for the Big Bang model itself, they quantify the overall framework, or background, for…
Loop quantum cosmology is a symmetry reduced quantization of cosmological spacetimes based on loop quantum gravity. While it has been successful in resolution of various cosmological singularities and connecting Planck scale physics to…
A brief overview of loop quantum cosmology of homogeneous isotropic models is presented with emphasis on the origin of and subtleties associated with the resolution of big bang and big crunch singularities. These results bear out the…
Loop quantum cosmology is a tentative approach to model the universe down to the Planck era where quantum gravity settings are needed. The quantization of the universe as a dynamical space-time is inspired by Loop Quantum Gravity ideas. In…
Cosmology is operating now on a well established and tightly constraining empirical basis. The relativistic LambdaCDM hot big bang theory is consistent with all the present tests; it has become the benchmark. But the many open issues in…
Quantum cosmology has traditionally been studied at the level of symmetry-reduced minisuperspace models, analyzing the behavior of wave functions. However, in the absence of a complete full setting of quantum gravity and detailed knowledge…
This article sheds new light on the problem of cosmological reduction in Loop Quantum Gravity. We critically analyze Quantum Reduced Loop Gravity -- an attempt to extract the cosmological sector of the full theory. We reconsider the…
In this talk, I review some recent work on cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in an open universe. I emphasize that the observed CMB anisotropies are still consistent with a low value of $\Omega$, and I address the question of…