Related papers: Cosmic shadows of causation
The large scale distribution of galaxies in the universe displays a complex pattern of clusters, super-clusters, filaments and voids with sizes limited only by the boundaries of the available samples. A quantitative statistical…
The physical basis of the modern cosmological inflationary models with baryosynthesis and nonbaryonic dark matter and energy implies such predictions of particle theory, that, in turn, apply to cosmology for their test. It makes physics of…
Quantum gravity, as a fundamental theory of space-time, is expected to reveal how the universe may have started, perhaps during or before an inflationary epoch. It may then leave a potentially observable (but probably minuscule) trace in…
The epoch when the Universe had a temperature higher than a GeV is long before any time at which we have reliable observations constraining the cosmological evolution. For example, the occurrence of a second burst of inflation (sometimes…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which permeates the entire Universe, is the radiation left over from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. On very large scales, the CMB radiation field is smooth and isotropic, but the existence of…
The characteristics of the cosmic microwave background provide circumstantial evidence that the hot radiation-dominated epoch in the early universe was preceded by a period of inflationary expansion. Here, we show how a measurement of the…
Fundamental formulae representing the density perturbation spectrums generated in inflationary scenarios are rigorously proved. Quantum fluctuations as initial conditions for structure generation in some inflationary era can be calculated…
We suggest here a mechanism for the seeding of the primordial density fluctuations. We point out that a process like reheating at the end of inflation will inevitably generate perturbations, even on superhorizon scales, by the local…
We consider cosmological models based on the spectral action formulation of (modified) gravity. We analyze the coupled effects, in this model, of the presence of nontrivial cosmic topology and of fractality in the large scale structure of…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
Inflation may provide unique insight into the physics at the highest available energy scales that cannot be replicated in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Features in the primordial power spectrum are generically predicted in a wide…
The absence of large-angle correlations in the map of cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations is among the well-established anomalies identified in full-sky and cut-sky maps over the past three decades. Suppressed large-angle…
An overview is presented of possible cosmologically distant sources of gravitational wave backgrounds, especially those which might produce detectable backgrounds in the LISA band between 0.1 and 100 mHz. Examples considered here include…
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…
The predictive power of cosmic inflation hinges on the existence of a conserved quantity at very large scales, called the primordial curvature perturbation, which is therefore insensitive to the details of reheating and the physics of the…
We present an alternative scenario for cosmic structure formation where initial fluctuations are due to Kalb-Ramond axions produced during a pre-big bang phase of inflation. We investigate whether this scenario, where the fluctuations are…
We discuss the potential cosmological role of gravitational wave astronomy as a probe of the very early universe. The next generation of detectors - now in production - may be able to observe a stochastic background of gravitational waves…
We examine the possibility that circles in the cosmic microwave background could be formed by the interaction of a gravitational wave pulse emitted in some pre-big-bang phase of the universe with the last scattering surface. We derive the…
We generalize a recently proposed mechanism for the origin of primordial metric perturbations in inflationary models. Quantum fluctuations of light scalar fields during inflation give rise to super-horizon fluctuations of masses and…
Cosmology appears as the most promising way to test and constrain quantum gravity theories. Loop quantum gravity is among the most advanced attempts to perform a non-perturbative quantization of general relativity. Its cosmological…