Related papers: Closed Universes from Cosmological Instantons
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of the early and late accelerated phases of the Universe, linking the inflationary epoch to the present-day dark energy-dominated era through a single scalar degree of freedom. In this…
We re-analyze the question of the use of cosmological observations to infer the present state and future evolution of our patch of the universe. In particular, we discuss under which conditions one might be able to infer that our patch will…
We provide a realisation of a singularity-free inflationary universe in the form of a simple cosmological model dominated at early times by a single minimally coupled scalar field with a physically based potential. The universe starts…
We consider the description of cosmological dynamics from the onset of inflation by a perfect fluid whose parameters must be consistent with the strength of the enhanced quantum loop effects that can arise during inflation. The source of…
Positively-curved, oscillatory universes are studied within the context of Loop Quantum Cosmology subject to a consistent semi-classical treatment. The semi-classical effects are reformulated in terms of an effective phantom fluid with a…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
Observational Cosmology has indeed made very rapid progress in recent years. The ability to quantify the universe has largely improved due to observational constraints coming from structure formation Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more…
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.…
Warm-intermediate inflationary universe models in the context of braneworld cosmologies, are studied. This study is done in the weak and strong dissipative regimes. We find that, the scalar potentials and dissipation coefficients in terms…
In the light of recent observations which point to an open universe $(\Omega_{0}<1)$, we construct an open singularity-free cosmological model by reconsidering a model originally constructed for a closed universe. Our model starts from a…
Recent cosmic microwave background observations favor low energy scale inflationary models in a closed universe. However, onset of inflation in such models for a closed universe is known to be severely problematic. In particular, such a…
The existence of initial singularities in expanding universes is proved without assuming the timelike convergence condition. The assumptions made in the proof are ones likely to hold both in open universes and in many closed ones. (It is…
The solution for an inflationary universe without singularities is derived from the Einstein-Lemaitre equations. The present state of the universe evolved from a steady state solution for a tiny, but classical micro-universe with large…
Perhaps the deepest mystery of our accelerating Universe in expansion is the existence of a tiny and rigid cosmological constant, $\Lambda$. Its size is many orders of magnitude below the expected one in the standard model of particle…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
It seems generic to have vacua with lower dimensionality than ours. We consider the possibility that the observable universe originated in a transition from one of these vacua. Such a universe has anisotropic spatial curvature. This may be…
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…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
It is proposed that if quantum states of space-time are coherent on null surfaces, holographic Planck-scale fluctuations of inflationary horizons dominate the formation of primordial scalar curvature perturbations. It is shown that the…
Recent results from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments verify several of the predictions of inflation, while ruling out a number of alternative structure-formation scenarios. Given the successes of the theory, the obvious next…