Related papers: Cosmology in nonlocal gravity
The huge amounts of undetected and exotic dark matter and dark energy needed to make general relativity work on large scales argue that we should investigate modifications of gravity. The only stable, metric-based and invariant alternative…
When general relativity is augmented by quadratic gravity terms, it becomes a renormalisable theory of gravity. This theory may admit a non-Gaussian fixed point as envisaged in the asymptotic safety program, rendering the theory trustworthy…
The probability of there being sufficient inflation to solve the fine-tuning associated with the horizon and flatness problems has recently been shown to be exponentially small, within the context of classical general relativity. Here this…
The early universe need not be described by an incomplete inflationary phase connected to a separate, more exotic prehistory. Recent results show that, within non-static FRW cosmology, only positive spatial curvature permits a nonsingular,…
I review a string-inspired cosmological model, with gravitational anomalies present at very early epochs, which includes a totally antisymmetric torsion, that in (3+1)-dimensions is equivalent to a pseudoscalar (Kalb-Ramond, string-model…
Scalar-tensor theory of gravity with non-minimal coupling is a fairly good candidate for dark energy, required to explain late-time cosmic evolution. Here we study the very early stage of evolution of the universe with a modified version of…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
In this paper we study the most general covariant action of gravity up to terms that are quadratic in curvature. In particular this includes non-local, infinite derivative theories of gravity which are ghost-free and exhibit asymptotic…
A theory of exponential modified gravity which explains both early-time inflation and late-time acceleration, in a unified way, is proposed. The theory successfully passes the local tests and fulfills the cosmological bounds and,…
We generalise Einstein's formulation of the traceless Einstein equations to $f(R)$ gravity theories. In the case of the vacuum traceless Einstein equations, we show that a non-constant Weyl tensor leads via a conformal transformation to a…
Since the standard inflationary paradigm is based on quantum field theory on classical space-times, it excludes the Planck era. Using techniques from loop quantum gravity, the paradigm is extended to a self-consistent theory from the Planck…
We investigate the pre-inflationary dynamics of inflation with the Starobinsky potential, favored by recent data from the Planck mission, using techniques developed to study cosmological perturbations on quantum spacetimes in the framework…
A new class of gravity-matter models defined in terms of two independent non-Riemannian volume forms (alternative generally covariant integration measure densities) on the space-time manifold are studied in some detail. These models involve…
Inflationary cosmology attempts to provide a natural explanation for the flatness and homogeneity of the observable universe. In the context of reversible (unitary) evolution, this goal is difficult to satisfy, as Liouville's theorem…
Higher-order theories of gravity are extensions to general relativity (GR) motivated mainly by high-energy physics searching for GR ultraviolet completeness. They are characterized by the inclusion of correction terms in the…
Loop Quantum Gravity is a background independent, nonperturbative approach to the quantization of General Relativity. Its application to models of interest in cosmology and astrophysics, known as Loop Quantum Cosmology, has led to new and…
We present a mechanism for the emergence of cosmic acceleration within the mean-field approximation of Group Field Theory models of quantum gravity. Depending on the interaction type, the resulting cosmological dynamics can either feature a…
We study the creation and evolution of cosmological perturbations in renormalizable quadratic gravity with a Weyl term. We adopt a prescription that implies the stability of the vacuum at the price of introducing a massive spin-two ghost…
We show that on the average, homogeneous and isotropic scalar field and on the average homogeneous and isotropic ensembles of classical and quantum gravitational waves generate the de Sitter expansion of the empty (with no matter)…
A local phenomenological model that reduces to a non-local gravitational theory giving dark energy is proposed. The non-local gravity action is known to fit the data as well as $\Lambda$-CDM thereby demanding a more fundamental local…