Related papers: Observing Quanta on a Cosmic Scale
Astronomers seem to be observing the fossilized remnants of quantum gravitational processes which took place during the epoch of {\it primordial inflation} that is conjectured to have occurred during the first $10^{-32}$ seconds of cosmic…
A novel primordial spectrum with a dynamical scale of quantum gravity origin is proposed to explain the sharp fall off of the angular power spectra at low multipoles in the COBE and WMAP observations. The spectrum is derived from quantum…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
Quantum diffusion describes the inflow of vacuum quantum fluctuations as they get amplified by gravitational instability, and stretched to large distances during inflation. In this picture, the dynamics of the universe's expansion becomes…
In a recent proposal using the group field theory approach, a spatially homogeneous (generally anisotropic) universe is described as a quantum gravity condensate of "atoms of space," which allows the derivation of an effective cosmological…
Inflationary cosmology has, in the last few years,received a strong dose of support from observations. The fact that the fluctuation spectrum can be extracted from the inflationary scenario through an analysis that involves quantum field…
The primordial Universe can be used as a laboratory to set constraints on quantum gravity. In the framework of Loop Quantum Cosmology, we show that such a proposal for quantum gravity not only solves for the big bang singularity issue but…
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
We propose a new source for the cosmological density perturbation which is passive fluctuations of the inflaton driven dynamically by a colored quantum noise as a result of its coupling to other massive quantum fields. The created…
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…
It was recently shown that gravitons with a very small mass should have formed a Bose-Einstein condensate in the very early Universe, whose density and quantum potential can account for the dark matter and dark energy in the Universe…
Phase transitions in the early universe can readily create an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that such a background necessarily contains anisotropies analogous to those of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We discuss the effects of cosmic phase transition on the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves generated during inflation. The energy density of the scalar condensation responsible for the phase transition may become sizable at the…
In order to find the correct theory of quantum gravity, one has to look for observational effects in any candidate theory. Here, we focus on canonical quantum gravity and calculate the quantum-gravitational contributions to the anisotropy…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
The temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background observed by COBE provide strong support for an inflationary phase in the early universe, below the GUT scale. We argue that a singlet field in a hidden sector of an effective…
How well can we constrain the initial quantum state of metric perturbations sourced during inflation? We exhibit an interesting new class of quantum states that entangle the scalar metric perturbations {\zeta} with other fields such as…
A major challenge at the interface of quantum gravity and cosmology is to explain the emergence of the large-scale structure of the Universe from Planck scale physics. In this letter, we extract the dynamics of scalar isotropic cosmological…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…
According to the inflationary scenario for the very early Universe, all inhomogeneities in the Universe are of genuine quantum origin. On the other hand, looking at these inhomogeneities and measuring them, clearly no specific quantum…