Related papers: Numerical Relativity as a New Tool for Fundamental…
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…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
Cosmology is very exciting for three reasons. There is a very successful standard model - the hot big bang - which describes the evolution of the Universe from 10^{-2} sec onward. There are bold ideas, foremost among them are inflation and…
Cosmography, as an integral branch of cosmology, strives to characterize the Universe without relying on pre-determined cosmological models. This model-independent approach utilizes Taylor series expansions around the current epoch,…
Assuming that the relativistic universe is homogeneous and isotropic, we can unambiguously determine its model and physical properties, which correspond with the Einstein general theory of relativity (and with its two special partial…
We present an overview of recent developments in numerical relativity studies of higher dimensional spacetimes with a focus on time evolutions of black-hole systems. After a brief review of the numerical techniques employed for these…
Using an approach that treats the Ricci scalar itself as a degree of freedom, we analyze the cosmological evolution within an f(R) model that has been proposed recently (exponential gravity) and that can be viable for explaining the…
This survey is devoted to recent developments in the statistical analysis of spherical data, with a view to applications in Cosmology. We will start from a brief discussion of Cosmological questions and motivations, arguing that most…
Loop quantum cosmology is an application of recent developments for a non-perturbative and background independent quantization of gravity to a cosmological setting. Characteristic properties of the quantization such as discreteness of…
Being based on the only assumption that the universe is homogenous and isotropic on large scales, cosmography is an ideal tool to investigate the cosmic expansion history in a almost model-independent way. Fitting the data on the luminosity…
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…
General relativity marked the beginning of modern cosmology and it has since been at the centre of many of the key developments in this field. In the present review, we discuss the general-relativistic dynamics and perturbations of the…
This text aims to give a pedagogical introduction into the main concepts of the theory of structure formation in the universe. The text is suited for graduate students of astronomy with a moderate background in general relativity. A special…
A general-relativistic theory of cosmology, the dynamical variables of which are those of Hubble's, namely distances and redshifts, is presented. The theory describes the universe as having a three-phase evolution with a decelerating…
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
Small fluctuations around homogeneous and isotropic expanding backgrounds are the main object of study in cosmology. Their origin and evolution is sensitive to the physical processes that happen during inflation and in the late Universe. As…
The aim of this paper is to show, that the 'oscillating universe' is a viable alternative to inflation. We remind that this model provides a natural solution to the flatness or entropy and to the horizon problem of standard cosmology. We…
We review the role of fluids in cosmology by first introducing them in General Relativity and then by applying them to a FRW Universe's model. We describe how relativistic and non-relativistic components evolve in the background dynamics.…
Loop Quantum Gravity is a nonperturbative and background independent program for the quantization of General Relativity. Its underlying formalism has been applied successfully to the study of cosmological spacetimes, both to test the…
The torsion is shown to be vitally important in the explanation of the evolution of the universe in a large class of gravitational theories containing quadratic terms of curvature and torsion. The cosmological solutions with homogeneous and…