Related papers: Cosmological consequences of statistical inhomogen…
Prospects for testing the adiabaticity of the primordial cosmological perturbations using MAP and PLANCK are evaluated. The most general cosmological perturbation in a universe with just baryons, photons, neutrinos, and a cold dark matter…
Analytical and numerical methods are developed to analyze the quantum nature of the big bang in the setting of loop quantum cosmology. They enable one to explore the effects of quantum geometry both on the gravitational and matter sectors…
Several cosmological measurements have attained significant levels of maturity and accuracy over the last decade. Continuing this trend, future observations promise measurements of the statistics of the cosmic mass distribution at an…
We revisit an inflationary scenario in which primordial inhomogeneities arise from a quantum collapse, a stochastic mechanism described in the context of quantum collapse theories in its continuous version and within semiclassical gravity.…
The Hamiltonian approach to cosmological perturbations in general relativity in finite space-time is developed, where a cosmological scale factor is identified with spatial averaging the metric determinant logarithm. This identification…
Some form of missing energy may account for the difference between the observed cosmic matter density and the critical density. Two leading candidates are a cosmological constant and quintessence (a time-varying, inhomogenous component with…
The residuals of the power spectra of WMAP and Planck's cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies data are known to exhibit a few interesting anomalies at different scales with marginal statistical significance. Combining bottom-up and…
CMB anisotropy data could put powerful constraints on theories of the evolution of our Universe. Using the observations of the large number of CMB experiments, many studies have put constraints on cosmological parameters assuming different…
Current measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropy power spectra of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) seem to indicate that the naive expectation for the slow-roll hierarchy within the most simple inflationary paradigm…
We review the basic hypotheses which motivate the statistical framework used to analyze the cosmic microwave background, and how that framework can be enlarged as we relax those hypotheses. In particular, we try to separate as much as…
Standard quantum field theory arguments predict an enormous cosmological constant. But what would this mean observationally? For a homogeneous universe the answer is clear, but if the universe is inhomogeneous at the Planck scale, the…
We study the impact of the cosmological parameters uncertainties on the measurements of primordial non-Gaussianity through the large-scale non-Gaussian halo bias effect. While this is not expected to be an issue for the standard LCDM model,…
We revisit the {\it origin of structures problem} of standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology to point out an unjustified approximation in the prevalent analysis. We follow common procedures in statistical mechanics to revise the issue…
We investigate a set of cosmological models for which the primordial power spectrum has a large-scale power deficit. The standard power-law spectrum is subject to long-wavelength modifications described by some new parameters, resulting in…
The propagation of perturbations is studied with generalized holonomy corrections in a fully consistent way, ensuring that the deformed algebra of constraints remains closed. The primordial cosmological power spectra are calculated. It is…
The possibility of extending the quantum mechanical superposition principle to free parameters such as the cosmological constant appearing in the Lagrangian of physical theories is examined. If the cosmological constant is subject to a…
The consensus of opinion in cosmology is that the Universe is currently undergoing a period of accelerated expansion. With current and proposed high precision experiments it offers the hope of being able to discriminate between the two…
We reconsider the issue of proving large scale spatial homogeneity of the universe, given isotropic observations about us and the possibility of source evolution both in numbers and luminosities. Two theorems make precise the freedom…
The origin of small deviations from statistical isotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) - the so-called CMB anomalies - remains an open question in modern cosmology. In this work, we test statistical isotropy in Planck Data…
In the past years 'quintessence' models have been considered which can produce the accelerated expansion in the universe suggested by recent astronomical observations. One of the key differences between quintessence and a cosmological…