Related papers: Present limits to cosmic bubbles from the COBE-DMR…
Observations show that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contains tiny variations at the 10^{-5} level around its black-body equilibrium temperature. The detection of these temperature fluctuations provides to modern Cosmology evidence…
We consider an alternative scenario of inflation which can account for a spatially open universe. It is similar to the old inflation in which the bubble nucleation occurs in the sea of false vacuum, but differs from it in that the second…
Cosmic bubble collisions provide an important possible observational window on the dynamics of eternal inflation. In eternal inflation, our observable universe is contained in one of many bubbles formed from an inflating metastable vacuum.…
In the traditional view a cosmic first-order phase transition cannot occur without nucleating handful of bubbles in the entire Hubble volume. The presence of domain walls during the transition may, however, significantly alter the dynamics…
Repeated studies of the CMB based on WMAP data have revealed an apparent asymmetry in the distribution of temperature fluctuations over the celestial sphere. The studies indicate that the amplitudes of temperature fluctuations are higher in…
The failure of the XMM-Newton and Chandra X-ray telescopes to detect cooling gas in elliptical galaxies and clusters of galaxies has led many to adopt the position that the gas is not cooling at all and that heating by an active nucleus in…
We explore a model of the early universe in which the inflationary epoch is preceded by a cosmic bounce, and argue that this scenario provides a common origin to several of the anomalous features that have been observed at large angular…
The dynamics of false vacuum decay at the end of inflation is studied. It is shown that the creation of a new phase is mainly stimulated by temperature fluctuations. Moving walls of O(3)-symmetric bubbles weakly interact with their…
We consider the classical fluctuations of the gravitational constant generated by bubbles in the inflationary universe. For extended inflation, we demonstrate numerically how and how large fluctuations are produced during bubble expansion.…
Local non-Gaussianities in the initial conditions of the Universe, parameterized by $f_{\rm NL}$, induce a scale-dependence in the large-scale bias of halos in the late Universe. This effect is a promising path to constrain multi-field…
The 21-cm brightness temperature fluctuation from the Dark Ages ($z \simeq 30-100$) will allow us to probe the inflationary epoch on very small scales ($>0.1 \, \mbox{Mpc}^{-1}$), inaccessible to cosmic microwave background experiments.…
I give a general formulation of the constraints on models of inflation ended by a first order phase transition arising from the requirement that they do not produce too many large (observable) true vacuum voids -- the `big bubble problem'.…
Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), particularly when combined with other datasets, have revolutionised our knowledge of the values of the basic cosmological parameters. Here we summarize the state of…
The nucleation and evolution of bubbles are investigated in the model of an $O(3)$-symmetric scalar field coupled to gravity in the high temperature limit. It is shown that, in addition to the well-known bubble of which the inside region is…
We investigate the hemispherical power asymmetry observed in the CMBR by attributing it to an early inhomogeneous phase of cosmic expansion. Unlike the conventional assumption of a perfectly isotropic and homogeneous pre-inflationary…
I review the general aspects of cosmological parameter estimation from observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies in the framework of inflationary adiabatic models. The most recent CMB datasets are…
Inflationary models that involve bursts of particle production generate bump-like features in the primordial power spectrum of density perturbations. These features influence the evolution of density fluctuations, leaving their unique…
Inflation as the leading paradigm depicting the very early universe physics could leave imprints on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Using currently available CMB observations, we give the tightest constraints on inflation…
We compute the contribution to the three--point temperature correlation function of the Cosmic Microwave Background coming from the non--linear evolution of Gaussian initial perturbations, as described by the Rees--Sciama (or integrated…
Assuming a slow-roll inflationary model where conformal invariance of the Maxwell action is broken via a non-minimal kinetic coupling term, we investigate the non-Gaussian three-point cross-correlation function between the primordial…