Related papers: Finite Bubble Statistics Constrain Late Cosmologic…
We study cosmological perturbations in a model of unified dark matter and dark energy with a sharp transition in the late-time universe. The dark sector is described by a dark fluid which evolves from an early stage at redshifts $z > z_C$…
Observers have demonstrated that it is now feasible to measure the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature at high redshifts. We explore the possible constraints on cosmology which might ultimately be derived from such measurements.…
Space-filling S-branes can mediate a transition between a contracting and an expanding universe in the Einstein frame. Following up on previous work that uncovered such bouncing solutions in the context of weakly coupled thermal…
When strongly supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) are sufficiently slow, super-horizon inhomogeneities can be generated. We compute these super-horizon curvature perturbations by employing a gauge-invariant,…
An intriguing possibility that can address pathologies in both early universe cosmology (i.e. the horizon problem) and quantum gravity (i.e. non-renormalizability), is that particles at very high energies and/or temperatures could propagate…
Particle phase transitions in the early universe including electroweak and grand unification ones are well-studied subjects. We point out that there are new possible particle phase transitions around inflation. Those new inflationary…
We point out a possible generation mechanism of non-Gaussian bubbles in the sky due to bubble nucleation in the early universe. We consider a curvaton scenario for inflation and assume that the curvaton field phi, whose energy density is…
Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), particularly when combined with other datasets, have revolutionised our knowledge of the values of the basic cosmological parameters. Here we summarize the state of…
Recent measurements of the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation from the WMAP satellite provide indication of a non-Gaussian behavior. Although the observed feature is small, it is detectable and…
Recent experimental data indicates that the fine structure constant alpha may be varying on cosmological time scales. We consider the possibility that such a variation could be induced by a second order phase transition which occurs at late…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations are used to constrain reheating to Standard Model (SM) particles after a period of inflation. As a light spectator field, the SM Higgs boson acquires large field values from its quantum…
We compute the power spectrum of curvature perturbations in stochastic inflation. This combines the distribution of first crossing times through the end-of-inflation surface, which has been previously studied, with the distribution of the…
Though simple inflationary models describe the CMB well, their corrections are often plagued by infrared effects that obstruct a reliable calculation of late-time behaviour. We adapt to cosmology tools designed to address similar issues in…
Fluctuations in the cosmic neutrino background are known to produce a phase shift in the acoustic peaks of the cosmic microwave background. It is through the sensitivity to this effect that the recent CMB data has provided a robust…
In this work we generalize the idea of a gravitational phase transition or GPT at late times to allow for a modified gravity scenario in the early universe as well. The original GPT was shown to simultaneously relax the $H_0$ and $\sigma_8$…
Of the universe's original gauge symmetries, only $SU(3)_c$ (quantum chromodynamics) and $U(1)_{\rm EM}$ (electromagnetism) remain unbroken today. There is, however, no reason to assume that these symmetries are permanent. This paper…
The cosmological constant is not necessarily small in the early universe. If a scalar field obtains a vacuum expectation value after a phase transition (PT), a possibly large cosmological constant could present before PT. The early…
In a cosmological first-order phase transition (FOPT), the true and false vacuum bubble radius distributions are not expected to be monochromatic, as is usually assumed. Consequently, Fermi balls (FBs) and primordial black holes (PBHs)…
First-order phase transitions (FOPTs) are ubiquitous in physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). Recently, models with no dimensionful parameters in the tree-level action have been attracting much attention because they can predict a very…
In the context of SUSY GUTs, GUT scale cosmic strings formed at the end of hybrid inflation are compatible with currently available CMB measurements. The maximum allowed cosmic strings contribution to the CMB data constrains the free…