Related papers: A small Universe
With the era of precision cosmology upon us, and upcoming surveys expected to further improve the precision of our observations below the percent level, ensuring the accuracy of our theoretical cosmological model is of the utmost…
Inflationary models, especially those with plateau-type potentials, are consistent with the cosmological data, but inflation itself does not resolve the initial singularity. This singularity is resolved, for example, by the idea of the…
The question of determining the spatial geometry of the Universe is of greater relevance than ever, as precision cosmology promises to verify inflationary predictions about the curvature of the Universe. We revisit the question of what can…
The matter content of the Universe is generally regarded as a perfect fluid on sufficiently large scales, for all epochs. But the recent cosmological matter distribution, consisting of an (ideally) random distribution of gravitationally…
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…
Many cosmologists (myself included) have advocated volume weighting for the cosmological measure problem, weighting spatial hypersurfaces by their volume. However, this often leads to the Boltzmann brain problem, that almost all…
The matter content of the Universe is strongly inhomogeneous on small scales. Motivated by this fact, we consider a model of the Universe that has regularly spaced discrete masses, rather than a continuous fluid. The optical properties of…
We describe the non-minimal Standard Model, consisting of minimalistic extensions of the Standard Model, which for all we know is the theory of the universe, able to describe all of the universe from the beginning of time. Extensions…
We consider a Universe with a three-torus topology which before inflation is devoid of any matter or radiation. Its pre-inflationary evolution is driven solely by Casimir energies of the existing fields, with a radiation-like equation of…
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 theory of the inflationary multiverse changes the way we think about our place in the world. According to its most popular version, our world may consist of infinitely many exponentially large parts, exhibiting different sets of…
Bayesian model averaging is a procedure to obtain parameter constraints that account for the uncertainty about the correct cosmological model. We use recent cosmological observations and Bayesian model averaging to derive tight limits on…
We consider a cosmological model in which our Universe is a spherically symmetric bubble wall in 5-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime. We argue that the bubble on which we live will undergo collisions with other similar bubbles and…
The maximum size of a bound cosmic structure is computed perturbatively as a function of its mass in the framework of the cubic galileon, proposed recently to model the dark energy of our Universe. Comparison of our results with…
It is well known that observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are highly sensitive to the spatial curvature of the Universe, k. Here we find that what is in fact being tightly constrained by small angle fluctuations is spatial…
Astrophysical observations provide a picture of the universe as a 4-dim homogeneous and isotropic flat space-time dominated by an unknown form of dark energy. To achieve such a cosmology one has to consider in the early universe an…
In a universe dominated by a small cosmological constant or by eternal dark energy with equation of state w < -1/3, observers are surrounded by event horizons. The horizons limit how much of the universe the observers can ever access. We…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
Cosmology is operating now on a well established and tightly constraining empirical basis. The relativistic LambdaCDM hot big bang theory is consistent with all the present tests; it has become the benchmark. But the many open issues in…
The observable universe is necessarily hospitable for life. There are indications, however, that the laws of physics and cosmological parameters need not take the form and values observed, and if they were slightly different life could not…