Related papers: Inflation at the Edge
We propose a Lambda-inflation model which explains a significant part of the COBE signal by primordial cosmic gravitational waves. The primordial density perturbations fulfill both the constraints of large-scale microwave background and…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
The advent of high resolution cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments now allows studies on the temperature fluctuations at scales corresponding to few arcminutes and below. Though the reported excess power at $\ell \sim 2000 - 6000$…
Inflation arises in supersymmetric grand unified theories (susy GUTs) without fine tuning and cosmic strings usually form at the end of inflation. Hence both strings and inflation contribute to the density perturbations in the very early…
Data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are discriminating between different models of inflation, disfavoring simple monomial potentials whilst being consistent with models whose predictions resemble those of the Starobinsky $R + R^2$…
Recent developments in cosmology suggest that much of the universe is in a state of explosive, accelerated expansion, called inflation. We live in a "bubble" where inflation has ended, and other bubbles with diverse properties are…
Attempts at building an unified description of the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions usually involve several stages of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We consider the effects of such symmetry breaking during an era of primordial…
We critically review the role of cosmological moduli in determining the post-inflationary history of the universe. Moduli are ubiquitous in string and M-theory constructions of beyond the Standard Model physics, where they parametrize the…
In this work, we investigate the physical aspects of the inflection-point inflation scenario and assess its observational viability in light of current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. The model we consider encapsulates the inflaton…
The measurements of the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations enable us to probe the physics of the very early Universe especially at the epoch of inflation. A particular interest lays on the detection…
We review the latest developments in the determination of the cosmological parameters from the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropies and of the Large Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe. We comment…
We review the currrent cosmic parameter determinations of relevance to inflation using the WMAP-1year, Boomerang, CBI, Acbar and other CMB data. The basic steps in the pipelines which determine the bandpowers from the raw data from which…
It has been proposed that the successful inflationary description of density perturbations on cosmological scales is sensitive to the details of physics at extremely high (trans-Planckian) energies. We test this proposal by examining how…
Cosmic inflation, a period of accelerated expansion in the early universe, can give rise to large amplitude ultra-large scale inhomogeneities on distance scales comparable to or larger than the observable universe. The cosmic microwave…
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.…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
This paper is the third in a series investigating the possibility that if we reside in an inflationary "bubble universe", we might observe the effects of collisions with other such bubbles. Here, we study the interior structure of a bubble…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
The terrain that theorists cover in this CMB golden age is described. We ponder early universe physics in quest of the fluctuation generator. We extoll the virtues of inflation and defects. We transport fields, matter and radiation into the…