Related papers: Cosmological consequences of statistical inhomogen…
In the standard inflationary paradigm the inhomogeneities observed in the CMB arise from quantum fluctuations of an initially homogeneous and isotropic vacuum state. This picture suffers from two well-known weaknesses. First, it assumes…
Persistent evidence for a cosmic hemispherical asymmetry in the temperature field of cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by both WMAP as well as PLANCK increases the possibility of its cosmological origin. Presence of this signal…
A mechanism for generating metric perturbations in inflationary models is considered. Long-wavelength inhomogeneities of light scalar fields in a decoupled sector may give rise to superhorizon fluctuations of couplings and masses in the…
Advantages of inhomogeneous cosmological models that are exact solutions of Einstein's equations over linearised perturbations of homogeneous models are presented. Examples of effects that can be described in the inhomogeneous ones are…
Cosmological models often contain scalar fields, which can acquire global nonzero expectation values that change with the comoving time. Among the possible consequences of these scalar-field backgrounds, an accelerated cosmological…
Usually the effects of isotropic inhomogeneities are not seriously taken into account in the determination of the cosmological parameters because of Copernican principle whose statement is that we do not live in the privileged domain in the…
We present a new programme for placing constraints on radial inhomogeneity in a dark-energy dominated universe. We introduce a new measure to quantify violations of the Copernican principle. Any violation of this principle would interfere…
In this article the cosmological constant problems, as well as the astronomical evidence for a cosmologically significant homogeneous exotic energy density with negative pressure (quintessence), are reviewed for a broad audience of…
With the era of precision cosmology upon us, and upcoming surveys expected to further improve the precision of our observations below the percent level, ensuring the accuracy of our theoretical cosmological model is of the utmost…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the existence of homogeneous surfaces as the background arena for structure formation. Homogeneity underpins both general relativistic and modified gravity models and is central to the way in…
Both the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Planck observations reported the hemispherical asymmetry of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature fluctuation. The hemispherical asymmetry might be stemmed from the…
A hypothetical dark energy component may have an equation of state that is different from a cosmological constant and possibly even changing in time. The spacing of the cosmic microwave background peaks is sensitive to the ratio of the…
We demonstrate that local, scale-dependent non-Gaussianity can generate cosmic variance uncertainty in the observed spectral index of primordial curvature perturbations. In a universe much larger than our current Hubble volume, locally…
Using the exact Lemaitre-Bondi-Tolman solution with a non-vanishing cosmological constant $\Lambda$, we investigate how the presence of a local spherically-symmetric inhomogeneity can affect apparent cosmological observables, such as the…
Physical models for the hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) reported by the Planck Collaboration must satisfy CMB constraints to the homogeneity of the Universe and quasar constraints to power asymmetries.…
Bouncing models of cosmology, as they arise e.g. in loop quantum cosmology, can be followed by an inflationary phase and generate close-to-scale-invariant fluctuation spectra as observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However,…
Anisotropy data analysis leaves a significant degeneracy between primeval spectral index (n_s) and cosmic opacity to CMB photons (\tau). Low--l polarization measures, in principle, can remove it. We perform a likelihood analysis to see how…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
We investigate observational consequences of the early episodically dominating dark energy on the evolution of cosmological structures. For this aim, we introduce the minimally coupled scalar field dark energy model with the…
The role of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarisation data in constraining the presence of primordial isocurvature modes is examined. While the MAP satellite mission will be unable to simultaneously constrain isocurvature modes and…