Related papers: Snowmass White Paper: The Cosmological Bootstrap
Gravitational physics is arguably better understood in the presence of a negative cosmological constant than a positive one, yet there exist strong technical similarities between the two settings. These similarities can be exploited to…
I review the standard paradigm for understanding the formation and evolution of cosmic structure, based on the gravitational instability of dark matter, but many variations on this basic theme are viable. Despite the great progress that has…
Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in the past decade. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and,…
Inflation is considered one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. However, the account of the origin of cosmic structure, as provided by the standard inflationary paradigm, is not fully satisfactory. The fundamental issue is the…
We develop a novel framework for describing quantum fluctuations in field theory, with a focus on cosmological applications. Our method uniquely circumvents the use of operator/Hilbert-space formalism, instead relying on a systematic…
Bootstrap is a novel and ambitious paradigm for quantum physics. It aims to solve the target problems by exploiting theoretical constraints from general physical principles and self-consistency conditions. The bootstrap philosophy dates…
Cosmological observations offer unique and robust avenues for probing the fundamental nature of dark matter particles-they broadly test a range of compelling theoretical scenarios, often surpassing or complementing the reach of terrestrial…
We review the successes and challenges of the holographic approach to cosmology. The model predicts an exactly scale invariant fluctuation spectrum with long and short distance cut-offs. It can account for the observed fluctuations in the…
A calculation of the one-mode occupation numbers for vacuum fluctuations of massive fields in De Sitter space shows that their use for the generation of classical density perturbations in inflationary cosmology very much depends on their…
The precise physical mechanism describing the emergence of the seeds of cosmic structure from a perfect isotropic and homogeneous universe has not been fully explained by the standard version of inflationary models. To handle this…
The hypothesis of the self-induced collapse of the inflaton wave function was proposed as responsible for the emergence of inhomogeneity and anisotropy at all scales. This proposal was studied within an almost de Sitter space-time…
The two fundamental assumptions in cosmology are that the Universe is statistically homogeneous and isotropic when averaged on large scales. Given the big implication of these assumptions, there has been a lot of statistical tests carried…
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…
In this thesis we investigate several aspects related to the theory of fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background. We develop a new algorithm to calculate the angular power spectrum of the anisotropies which is two orders of magnitude…
In light of the recent observational data coming from the sky we have two significant directions in the field of theoretical cosmology recently. First, we are now able to make use of present observations, such as the Planck and BICEP2 data,…
We introduce the "wedge diagram," an intuitive way to illustrate how cosmological models with a classical (non-singular) bounce generically resolve fundamental problems in cosmology. These include the well-known horizon, flatness, and…
The discovery of universe's late-time acceleration and dark energy has overseen a great deal of research into cosmological singularities and in this brief review, we discuss all the prominent developments in this field for the best part of…
The unitarity of time evolution, or colloquially the conservation of probability, sits at the heart of our descriptions of fundamental interactions via quantum field theory. The implications of unitarity for scattering amplitudes are well…
The entire classical cosmological history between two extreme de Sitter vacuum solutions is discussed based on Einstein's equations and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The initial non-singular de Sitter state is characterised by a very high…
Bootstrapped Newtonian gravity was developed with the purpose of estimating the impact of quantum physics in the nonlinear regime of the gravitational interaction, akin to corpuscular models of black holes and inflation. In this work, we…