Related papers: A Multiverse Outside of the Swampland
We study the realization of cosmic inflation in bigravity theories. By analyzing the evolution of scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations in de Sitter-like spacetimes, we find strong stability constraints on the class of viable vacua…
The fundamental paradox of the incompatibility of the observed large-scale uniformity of the Universe with the fact that the age of the Universe is finite is overcome by the introduction of an initial a period of superluminal expansion of…
We present an alternative scheme for an Emergent Universe scenario, developed previously in $Phys.\ Rev.\ D {\bf 86}, 083524 (2012)$, where the universe is initially in a static state supported by a scalar field located in a false vacuum.…
In this paper we consider the implications of the "landscape" paradigm for the large scale properties of the universe. The most direct implication of a rich landscape is that our local universe was born in a tunnelling event from a…
We wish to demonstrate how the presence of a dynamic cosmological parameter, plus a model of the universe as a quantum computer can be combined to give us a picture of early universe inflationary physics which is quite non linear, with a…
Observations indicate that the universe is effectively flat, but they do not rule out a closed universe. The role of positive curvature is negligible at late times, but can be crucial in the early universe. In particular, positive curvature…
In inflationary scenarios with more than one scalar field, inflation may proceed even if each of the individual fields has a potential too steep for that field to sustain inflation on its own. We show that scalar fields with exponential…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
We consider the statistical properties of vacua and inflationary trajectories associated with a random multifield potential. Our underlying motivation is the string landscape, but our calculations apply to general potentials. Using random…
Though predictions of the simplest inflationary cosmological models with cold dark matter, flat space and approximately flat initial spectrum of adiabatic perturbations are remarkably close to observational data, we have to go beyond them…
There is strong evidence from cosmological data that the universe underwent an epoch of superluminal expansion called inflation. A satisfactory embedding of inflation in fundamental physics has been an outstanding problem at the interface…
In the framework of scalar-tensor theories of gravity, we construct a new kind of cosmological model that conflates inflation and ekpyrosis. During a phase of conflation, the universe undergoes accelerated expansion, but with crucial…
We use holography to study dS-invariant states of non-conformal, strongly coupled quantum field theories in four-dimensional de Sitter space. We show that out-of-equilibrium effects can sustain the exponential inflation within the regime of…
The multi-measure model (MMM), in which one modifies the action to include both the Riemannian measure and a non-Riemannian one, has proven to be able to produce viable Universe evolution scenarios. In this article we consider two special…
A particular extension of Einstein's General Relativity up to and including quartic terms in the curvature tensor is minimal in the sense that it has a unique maximally symmetric vacuum and only a massless spin-2 excitation in its spectrum…
We propose a large class of nonsingular cosmologies of arbitrary spatial curvature whose cosmic history is determined by a primeval dynamical $\Lambda (t)$-term. For all values of the curvature, the models evolve between two extreme de…
Eternal inflation requires upward fluctuations of the energy in a Hubble volume, which appear to violate the energy conditions. In particular, a scalar field in an inflating spacetime should obey the averaged null energy condition, which…
If in a finite universe, the tree-level vacuum is a symmetric superposition of coherent states, in each of which the inflaton field assumes a different, energy-minimizing mean value (vev), then the resulting energy is positive and decreases…
Using ideas of STM theory, but starting from a 6D vacuum state, we propose an inflationary model where the universe emerges from the blast of a white hole. Under this approach, the expansion is affected by a geometrical deformation induced…
We compute the covariant three-point function near horizon-crossing for a system of slowly-rolling scalar fields during an inflationary epoch, allowing for an arbitrary field-space metric. We show explicitly how to compute its subsequent…