Related papers: Is Planckian discreteness observable in cosmology?
It is possible that the scale of gravity, parameterized by the apparent Planck mass, may obtain different values within different universes in an encompassing multiverse. We investigate the range over which the Planck mass may scan while…
While observational cosmology has shown tremendous growth over the last decade, deep mysteries continue to haunt our theoretical understanding of the ingredients of the concordance cosmological model, which are mainly `dark'. More than 95…
It is believed that the recent detection of large tensor perturbations strongly favors the inflation scenario in the early universe. This common sense depends on the assumption that Einstein's general relativity is valid at the early…
Verlinde and Zurek (VZ) have proposed that quantum gravity fluctuations in causal diamonds lead to observable effects. In particular, they argued that in quantum gravity causal diamonds have an uncertainty in their size that scales as…
We study the inflationary perturbations in general (classically) scale-invariant theories. Such scenario is motivated by the hierarchy problem and provides natural inflationary potentials and dark matter candidates. We analyse in detail all…
It is shown here that a dynamical Planck mass can drive the scale factor of the universe to accelerate. The negative pressure which drives the cosmic acceleration is identified with the unusual kinetic energy density of the Planck field. No…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…
Suppose the usual description of spacetime as a 4-dimensional manifold with a Lorentzian metric breaks down at Planck energies. Can we still construct sensible theoretical models of the universe? Are they testable? Do they lead to a…
It has recently been shown [1] that light vector particles produced from inflationary fluctuations can give rise to the dark matter in the Universe. A similar mechanism has been discussed in [2] for a non-minimally coupled scalar enjoying a…
A theory of evolution for the Universe requires both a mutation mechanism and a selection mechanism. We propose that both can be encountered in the stochastic approach to quantum cosmology. In Brans--Dicke chaotic inflation, the quantum…
In the quest for unification of the Standard Model with gravity, classical scale invariance can be utilized to dynamically generate the Planck mass $M_\mathrm{Pl}$. Then, the relation of Planck scale physics to the scale of electroweak…
The next decade will feature an abundance of novel cosmological data, while many fundamental questions about inflation remain. Given this, there is ample need for maximally efficient calculations, especially in non-standard scenarios for…
We propose a scenario of the beginning of inflation in which the non-vacuum value of the scalar field that drives inflation develops dynamically due to the non-minimal coupling to gravity. In this scenario, inflation emerges as an…
We present two scale invariant models of inflation in which the addition of quadratic in curvature terms in the usual Einstein-Hilbert action, in the context of Palatini formulation of gravity, manages to reduce the value of the…
Dynamical chiral symmetry breaking in a QCD-like hidden sector is used to generate the Planck mass and the electroweak scale including the heavy right-handed neutrino mass. A real scalar field transmits the energy scale of the hidden sector…
Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…
It was recently proposed that five-dimensional inflation can relate the causal size of the observable universe to the present weakness of gravitational interactions by blowing up an extra compact dimension from the microscopic fundamental…
We show that inflationary cosmology may be used to test the statistical predictions of quantum theory at very short distances and at very early times. Hidden-variables theories, such as the pilot-wave theory of de Broglie and Bohm, allow…
We calculate the impact of quantum gravity-motivated ultraviolet cutoffs on inflationary predictions for the cosmic microwave background spectrum. We model the ultraviolet cutoffs fully covariantly to avoid possible artifacts of covariance…
Stable scalars can be copiously produced in the Early Universe even if they have no coupling to other fields. We study production of such scalars during and after (high scale) inflation, and obtain strong constraints on their mass scale.…