Related papers: Observing Quanta on a Cosmic Scale
Long-wavelength gravitational waves can induce significant temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background. Distinguishing this from anisotropy induced by energy density fluctuations is critical for testing inflationary cosmology…
A rapid phase of accelerated expansion in the early universe, known as inflation, dilutes all matter except the vacuum induced quantum fluctuations. These are responsible for seeding the initial perturbations in the baryonic matter, the…
Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension---the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation---which…
The (large-scale) structures we observe in the Universe are classical, but within the inflationary scenario they do originate from quantum fluctuations. This leads to the question: ''How did this quantum-to-classical transition occur?''. A…
Until recently our knowledge of the primordial curvature perturbation was relatively modest. Ever since COBE delivered its map of data we know the scalar spectrum of primordial perturbations is approximately flat, with the power being only…
The vacuum fluctuations of all quantum fields filling the universe are supposed to leave enormous energy and pressure contributions which are incompatible with observations. It has been recently suggested that, when the effective nature of…
The linear cosmological perturbation theory of almost homogeneous and isotropic perfect fluid and scalar field universes is reconsidered and formally simplified. Using the existence of a covariant conserved quantity on large perturbation…
In the standard cosmological model, the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background is interpreted as variation in the gravitational potential at the point of emission, due to the emitter being embedded in a region ${\cal C}$…
We speculate that the early Universe was inside a primordial black hole. The interior of the the black hole is a dS background and the two spacetimes are separated on the surface of black hole's event horizon. We argue that this picture…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
Previously defined covariant and gauge-invariant perturbation variables, representing, e.g., the fractional spatial energy density gradient on hypersurfaces of constant expansion, are used to simplify the linear perturbation analysis of a…
For millennia, humanity has relied exclusively on light$\unicode{x2014}$initially visible light and, later, broader and broader portions of the electromagnetic spectrum$\unicode{x2014}$to observe the universe. In the past decade, a…
We propose an evolutional scenario of the universe which starts from quantum states with conformal invariance, passing through the inflationary era, and then makes transition to the conventional Einstein space-time. The space-time dynamics…
After introducing gauge-invariant cosmological perturbation theory we give an improved set of governing equations for multiple fluids including energy transfer. Having defined adiabatic and entropic perturbations we derive the…
The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) is the radiation left over from the hot Big Bang. Its blackbody spectrum and small anisotropy provide clues about the origin and early evolution of the Universe. In particular, the spectrum…
Cosmological inflation provides the simplest and most promising mechanism for generating fluctuations for structure formation. Using powerful Hamilton-Jacobi methods, I will describe (1) how to compute density fluctuations and cosmic…
Recently, we presented a unified way of analysing classical cosmological perturbation in generalized gravity theories. In this paper, we derive the perturbation spectrums generated from quantum fluctuations again in unified forms. We…
The predictive power of cosmic inflation hinges on the existence of a conserved quantity at very large scales, called the primordial curvature perturbation, which is therefore insensitive to the details of reheating and the physics of the…
We present a novel mechanism to generate the cosmic perturbation from evaporation of primordial black holes. A mass of a field is fluctuated if it is given by a vacuum expectation value of a light scalar field because of the quantum…
The epoch when the Universe had a temperature higher than a GeV is long before any time at which we have reliable observations constraining the cosmological evolution. For example, the occurrence of a second burst of inflation (sometimes…