Related papers: Cosmic tangle: Loop quantum cosmology and CMB anom…
Loop quantum cosmology (LQC) is used to provide concrete evidence in support of the general paradigm underlying spin foam models (SFMs). Specifically, it is shown that: i) the physical inner product in the timeless framework equals the…
This article presents an "in-a-nutshell" yet self-contained introductory review on loop quantum gravity (LQG) -- a background-independent, nonperturbative approach to a consistent quantum theory of gravity. Instead of rigorous and…
The Gowdy cosmologies provide a suitable arena to further develop Loop Quantum Cosmology, allowing the presence of inhomogeneities. For the particular case of Gowdy spacetimes with the spatial topology of a three-torus and a content of…
In the last decade, the study of the overall shape of the universe, called Cosmic Topology, has become testable by astronomical observations, especially the data from the Cosmic Microwave Background (hereafter CMB) obtained by WMAP and…
This is a short review, aimed at a general audience, of several current subjects of research in cosmology. The topics discussed include the cosmic microwave background (CMB), with particular emphasis on its relevance for testing inflation;…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) together with weak lensing measurements of the clustering of large scale cosmological structures and local measurements of the Hubble constant pose a challenge to the standard…
Loop Quantum Gravity is a theory that attempts to describe the quantum mechanics of the gravitational field based on the canonical quantization of General Relativity. According to Loop Quantum Gravity, in a gravitational field, geometric…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…
In recent years, numerous arguments have emerged suggesting that the LCDM (Lambda Cold Dark Matter) model may be inconsistent with observational data, requiring more or less radical revisions. Notable examples include the Hubble tension,…
Quantum cosmology in general denotes the application of quantum physics to the whole universe and thus gives rise to many realizations and examples, covering problems at different mathematical and conceptual levels. It is related to quantum…
Much of the foundational work on quantum cosmology employs a simple minisuperspace model describing a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe containing a massive scalar field. We show that the classical limit of this model exhibits…
Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…
The current standard model of cosmology - the {\ensuremath{\Lambda}}CDM model - is appropriately named after its controversial foreign ingredients: a cosmological constant ({\ensuremath{\Lambda}}) that accounts for the recent accelerated…
Quantum cosmology from the late sixties into the early twenty-first century is reviewed and appraised in the form of a debate, set up by two presentations on mainly the Wheeler-DeWitt quantization and on loop quantum cosmology,…
In this paper we briefly review the current status of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations, summarising the latest results obtained from CMB experiments, both in intensity and polarization, and the constraints imposed on the…
An overview is presented of a recently proposed "radically conservative" solution to the problem of dark energy in cosmology. The proposal yields a model universe which appears to be quantitatively viable, in terms of its fit to supernovae…
A brief review of various numerical techniques used in loop quantum cosmology and results is presented. These include the way extensive numerical simulations shed insights on the resolution of classical singularities, resulting in the key…
In order to account for the observable Universe, any comprehensive theory or model of cosmology must draw from many disciplines of physics, including gauge theories of strong and weak interactions, the hydrodynamics and microphysics of…
In this essay a critical review of present conceptual problems in current cosmology is provided from a more philosophical point of view. In essence, a digression on how could philosophy help cosmologists in what is strictly their…
We review some recent progress in the extraction of inflationary observables in loop quantum cosmology. Inverse-volume quantum corrections induce a growth of power in the large-scale cosmological spectra and are constrained by observations.