Related papers: Detecting a small perturbation through its non-Gau…
Recently it has been shown that the thermal holographic fluctuations can give rise to an almost scale invariant spectrum of metric perturbations since in this scenario the energy is proportional to the area of the boundary rather than the…
It was pointed out recently that in some inflationary models quantum loops containing a scalar of mass $m$ that couples to the inflaton can be the dominant source of primordial non-Gaussianities. We explore this phenomenon in the simplest…
We review the study of inhomogeneous perturbations about a homogeneous and isotropic background cosmology. We adopt a coordinate based approach, but give geometrical interpretations of metric perturbations in terms of the expansion, shear…
We discuss the evolution of linear perturbations about a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker background metric, using only the local conservation of energy-momentum. We show that on sufficiently large scales the curvature perturbation on spatial…
We investigate density perturbations sourced by a curvaton with a generic energy potential. The key feature of a curvaton potential which deviates from a quadratic is that the curvaton experiences a non-uniform onset of its oscillation.…
We obtain very stringent bounds on the possible cold dark matter, baryon and neutrino isocurvature contributions to the primordial fluctuations in the Universe, using recent cosmic microwave background and large scale structure data. In…
Cosmic microwave background observations are most commonly analyzed by estimating the power spectrum. In the limit where the CMB statistics are perfectly Gaussian, this extracts all the information, but the CMB also contains detectable…
Recently it has been shown that string gas cosmology, an alternative model of the very early universe which does not involve a period of cosmological inflation, can give rise to an almost scale invariant spectrum of metric perturbations.…
We investigate non-Gaussianity in general multiple-field inflation using the formalism we developed in earlier papers. We use a perturbative expansion of the non-linear equations to calculate the three-point correlator of the curvature…
We study constraints on primordial mode-coupling from the power spectrum, squeezed-limit bispectrum and collapsed trispectrum of matter and halos. We describe these statistics in terms of long-wavelength $2$-point functions involving the…
The most direct probe of non-Gaussian initial conditions has come from bispectrum measurements of temperature fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background and of the matter and galaxy distribution at large scales. Such bispectrum…
A sizeable level of non-Gaussianity in the primordial cosmological perturbations may be induced by a large trispectrum, i.e. by a large connected four-point correlation function. We compute the effect of a primordial non-Gaussian…
We present a novel theory of the very early universe which addresses the traditional horizon and flatness problems of big bang cosmology and predicts a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations. Unlike inflation, this scenario requires no…
In this review, we discuss how non-Gaussianity of cosmological perturbations arises from inflation. After introducing the in-in formalism to calculate the $n$-point correlation function of quantum fields, we present the computation of the…
A convincing detection of primordial non-Gaussianity in the cosmic background radiation (CMB) is essential to probe the physics of the early universe. Since a single statistical estimator can hardly be suitable to detect the various…
In this letter we review the separate universe approach for cosmological perturbations and point out that it is essentially the lowest order approximation to a gradient expansion. Using this approach, one can study the nonlinear evolution…
We consider whether the non-Gaussian scale-dependent halo bias can be used not only to constrain the local form of non-Gaussianity but also to distinguish among different shapes. In particular, we ask whether it can constrain the behavior…
In this article, we show that a stochastic form of scale-dependent halo bias arises in multi-source inflationary models, where multiple fields determine the initial curvature perturbation. We derive this effect for general non-Gaussian…
We consider scenarios where the dynamics of a quantum system are partially determined by prior local measurements of some interacting environmental degrees of freedom. The resulting effective system dynamics are described by a disordered…
We explore the correlations between primordial non-Gaussianity and isocurvature perturbation. We sketch the generic relation between the bispectrum of the curvature perturbation and the cross-correlation power spectrum in the presence of…