Related papers: Cosmic shadows of causation
The standard inflationary version of the origin of the cosmic structure as the result of the quantum fluctuations during the early universe is less than fully satisfactory as has been argued in [A. Perez, H. Sahlmann, and D. Sudarsky,…
The next generation of gravitational wave detectors holds out the prospect of detecting a stochastic gravitational background generated in the very early universe. In this article, we review the various cosmological processes which can lead…
A new effect is described by which primordial gravity waves leave a permanent signature in the large scale structure of the Universe. The effect occurs at second order in perturbation theory and is sensitive to the order in which…
We examine the cosmological sector of a gauge theory of gravity based on the SO(4,2) conformal group of Minkowski space. We allow for conventional matter coupled to the spacetime metric as well as matter coupled to the field that gauges…
A Planck scale inflationary era -- in a quantum gravity theory predicting discreteness of quantum geometry at the fundamental scale -- produces the scale invariant spectrum of inhomogeneities with very small tensor-to-scalar ratio of…
Gravitation and the standard model of particle physics are incorporated within a single conformal scalar-tensor theory, where the scalar field is complex. The Higgs field has a dynamical expectation value, as has the Planck mass, but the…
( to appear in: Proceedings of the Nishonomiya Yukawa Memorial Symposium Edited by M. Sasaki) There are several models for generating fluctuations in an open universe that are compatible with the microwave background fluctuations detected…
The most direct probe of non-Gaussian initial conditions has come from bispectrum measurements of temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background and of the matter and galaxy distribution at large scales. Such bispectrum…
Inflationary cosmology successfully accounts for the observed properties of primordial fluctuations using quantum field theory in an expanding background. However, the quantum nature of these fluctuations has not been experimentally…
Scalar and gravity wave subcurvature fluctuations are calculated for a background approximating the Hawking and Turok open universe model. The gravity wave cosmic microwave background contribution is finite and it appears that a…
General Relativity receives quantum corrections relevant at cosmological distance scales from the conformal scalar degrees of freedom required by the trace anomaly of the quantum stress tensor in curved space. In the theory including the…
One of the most powerful tools to probe the existence of cosmic defects in the early universe is through the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It is well known that computations with causal sources are more involved than the…
Quantum effects play an essential role in modern cosmology. Perhaps the most striking example comes from large-scale structures, generally assumed to originate from vacuum quantum fluctuations and stretched by an expansion phase. Inflation…
In the framework of the concordance cosmological model the first-order scalar and vector perturbations of the homogeneous background are derived in the weak gravitational field limit without any supplementary approximations. The sources of…
In the framework of inflationary models with non-vacuum initial states for cosmological perturbations, we study non-Gaussian signatures on the cosmic microwave background radiation produced by a broken-scale-invariant model which…
The standard inflationary version of the origin of the cosmic structure as the result of the quantum fluctuations during the inflationary stage is less than fully satisfactory: how exactly does the Universe transit from a homogeneous and…
Although the paradigm of inflation has been extensively studied to demonstrate how macroscopic inhomogeneities in our universe originate from quantum fluctuations, most of the established literature ignores the crucial role that…
Within the causal set approach to quantum gravity, a discrete analog of a spacelike region is a set of unrelated elements, or an antichain. In the continuum approximation of the theory, a moment-of-time hypersurface is well represented by…
Cosmological inflation provides the simplest and most promising mechanism for generating fluctuations for structure formation. Using powerful Hamilton-Jacobi methods, I will describe (1) how to compute density fluctuations and cosmic…
Motivated by recent work suggesting observably large spacetime fluctuations in the causal development of an empty region of flat space, we conjecture that these metric fluctuations can be quantitatively described in terms of a conformal…