Related papers: Singularities in inflationary cosmological models
The main objective of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of the bouncing scenario of the universe. The most widely recognized cosmological framework is the standard cosmological model, sometimes referred to as the Big Bang model.…
While cosmological inflation can erase primordial inhomogeneities, it is possible that inflation may not begin in a significantly inhomogeneous universe. This issue is particularly pressing in multifield scenarios, where even the…
We first study dark energy models with a minimally-coupled scalar field and exponential potentials, admitting exact solutions for the cosmological equations: actually, it turns out that for this class of potentials the Einstein field…
The inflationary universe can be viewed as a "Cosmological Collider" with energy of Hubble scale, producing very massive particles and recording their characteristic signals in primordial non-Gaussianities. To utilize this collider to…
Standard cosmology poses a number of important questions. Apart from its singular origin, it possesses early and late accelerating phases required to account for observations. The vacuum energy has been considered as a possible way to…
We study a scale-invariant model of quadratic gravity with a non-minimally coupled scalar field. We focus on cosmological solutions and find that scale invariance is spontaneously broken and a mass scale naturally emerges. Before the…
Currently there is no definitive description for the accelerated expansion of the Universe at both early and late times; we know these two periods as the epochs of inflation and dark energy. Contained within this Thesis are two studies of…
A scale-invariant universe can have a period of accelerated expansion at early times: inflation. We use a frame-invariant approach to calculate inflationary observables in a scale invariant theory of gravity involving two scalar fields -…
We study the quantum fluctuations of scalar fields with a variable effective mass during an inflationary phase. We consider the situation where the effective mass depends on a background scalar field, which evolves during inflation from…
Recently, attempts have been made to understand the apparent near coincidence of the present dark energy and matter energy in terms of a dynamical attractor-like solution for the evolution of a scalar field. In these models the field…
Phantom Cosmology provides an unique opportunity to "connect" the phantom driven (low en- ergy meV scale) dark energy phase to the (high energy GUT scale) inflationary era. This is possible because the energy density increases in phantom…
We study how the initial inhomogeneities of the universe affect the onset of inflation in the closed universe. We consider the model of a chaotic inflation which is driven by a massive scalar field. In order to construct an inhomogeneous…
Structure formation models with a cosmological constant are successful in explaining large-scale structure data, but are threatened by the magnitude-redshift relation for Type Ia supernovae. This has led to discussion of models where the…
Eternal inflation arising from a potential landscape predicts that our universe is one realization of many possible cosmological histories. One way to access different cosmological histories is via the nucleation of bubble universes from a…
We review conceptual aspects of inflationary scenarios able to produce primordial black holes, by amplifying the size of curvature fluctuations to the level required for triggering black hole formation. We identify general mechanisms to do…
The inflationary and pre-inflationary evolution of scalar modes of cosmological perturbations in a closed universe is analyzed for a loop quantum cosmology model with an inflationary regime consistent with the constraints on inflation…
The universe may have extra spatial dimensions with large volume that we cannot perceive because the energy required to excite modes in the extra directions is too high. Many examples are known of such manifolds with a large volume and a…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
We further clarify how scalar metric perturbations are amplified in an inflationary cosmology. We first construct a simple, analytic model of an inflationary cosmology in which the expansion scale factor evolves continuously from an…
We propose a scenario of the beginning of inflation in which the non-vacuum value of the scalar field that drives inflation develops dynamically due to the non-minimal coupling to gravity. In this scenario, inflation emerges as an…