Related papers: Primordial Gaussian Fluctuations from Cosmic Defec…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
We investigate the gauge-invariant cosmological perturbations in the gravity and matter frames in the general scalar-tensor theory where two frames are related by the disformal transformation. The gravity and matter frames are the…
Perturbations in a universe with matter and cosmological constant are computed in terms of the primordial scalar perturbation up to second order. The calculation is easy -- a generalization of the spherical dust solution. Our expression…
Primordial non-Gaussianity is a potentially powerful discriminant of the physical mechanisms that generated the cosmological fluctuations observed today. Any detection of significant non-Gaussianity would thus have profound implications for…
In inflationary cosmological models driven by an inflaton field the origin of the primordial inhomogeneities which are responsible for large scale structure formation are the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field. These are usually…
Topological defects are ubiquitous in condensed-matter physics but only hypothetical in the early universe. In spite of this, even an indirect evidence for one of these cosmic objects would revolutionize our vision of the cosmos. We give…
In the standard slow-roll inflationary cosmology, quantum fluctuations in a single field, the inflaton, generate approximately Gaussian primordial density perturbations. At present, the bispectrum and trispectrum of the density…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
A symmetry-breaking phase transition in the early universe could have led to the formation of cosmic defects. Because these defects dynamically excite not only scalar and tensor type cosmological perturbations but also vector type ones,…
We consider DHOST inflationary models with a shift symmetry leading to a de Sitter space-time at the background cosmological level. Deviations from scale invariance of the scalar and tensor perturbations follow from the breaking of the…
We show that there are inflationary models for which perturbations in the energy momentum tensor, which are of second order in the scalar field, cannot be neglected. We first specify the conditions under which the usual first order…
We show that dissipative effects have a significant impact on the evolution of cosmological scalar fields, leading to friction, entropy production and field fluctuations. We explicitly compute the dissipation coefficient for different…
The quasi-static solutions of the matter density perturbation in various dark energy models and modified gravity models have been investigated in numerous papers. However, the oscillating solutions in those models have not been investigated…
Primordial Gravitational Waves, i.e. a background of metric perturbations sourced by the quantum inflationary fluctuations, if measured, could both provide a substantial evidence for primordial inflation and shed light on physics at…
We review the study of inhomogeneous perturbations about a homogeneous and isotropic background cosmology. We adopt a coordinate based approach, but give geometrical interpretations of metric perturbations in terms of the expansion, shear…
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…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
We discuss correlation properties of a general mass density field introducing a classification of structures based on their complexity. Standard cosmological models for primordial mass fluctuations are characterized by a sort of large-scale…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
Here we review the present status of modelling of and searching for primordial non-Gaussianity of cosmological perturbations. After introducing the models for non-Gaussianity generation during inflation, we discuss the search for…