Related papers: Observing Quanta on a Cosmic Scale
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
We derive general analytic formulae for the power spectrum and spectral index of the curvature perturbation produced during inflation driven by a multi-component inflaton field, up to the second order in the slow-roll approximation. We do…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
We show that the fluctuations of quantum fields as seen by late comoving observers are significantly influenced by the history of the early Universe, and therefore they transmit information about the nature of spacetime in timescales when…
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…
We consider a class of inflationary models with small oscillations imprinted on an otherwise smooth inflaton potential. These oscillations are manifest as oscillations in the power spectrum of primordial perturbations, which then give rise…
The statistical properties of the primordial density perturbations has been considered in the past decade as a powerful probe of the physical processes taking place in the early universe. Within the inflationary paradigm, the properties of…
A variety of mechanisms in the early Universe lead to the generation of gravitational waves (GWs). We introduce here a novel source of GWs generated by vacuum fluctuations after inflation. Given that gravitons are minimally coupled…
The decoherence of quantum fluctuations into classical perturbations during inflation is discussed. A simple quantum mechanical argument, using a spatial particle wavefunction rather than a field description, shows that observable…
Our Universe has multiple examples of unexplained gravitational losses in black holes and neutron stars. As all of the space is squeezed out, nucleons are not easily compressible further. Gravitational loss will allow galactic black holes…
We derive the primordial power spectrum of density fluctuations in the framework of quantum cosmology. For this purpose we perform a Born-Oppenheimer approximation to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for an inflationary universe with a scalar…
We clarify the way in which cosmological perturbations of quantum origin, produced during inflation, assume classical properties. Two features play an important role in this process: First, the dynamics of fluctuations which are presently…
A huge value of cosmological constant characteristic for the particle physics and the inflation of early Universe are inherently related to each other: one can construct a fine-tuned superpotential, which produces a flat potential of…
The standard inflationary model presents a simple scenario within which the homogeneity, isotropy and flatness of the universe appear as natural outcomes and, in addition, fluctuations in the energy density are originated during the…
Several scenarios have been proposed in which primordial perturbations could originate from quantum vacuum fluctuations in a phase corresponding to a collapse phase (in an Einstein frame) preceding the Big Bang. I briefly review three…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
We study the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in the scenario where the baryon asymmetry of the universe is generated from a condensation of a scalar field. In such a scenario, the scalar condensation may acquire fluctuation…
Detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background indicate the large-scale homogeneity of the universe. On very small scales, we observe however inhomogeneities such as galaxies, stars, planets and ourselves. In the context of hot…