Related papers: The Curvaton Web
The cosmic large scale structure encodes the formation and evolution of a weblike network of dark matter and galaxies within the Universe. The cosmological information is wrapped up in non-Gaussian statistics requiring characterisation…
We calculate the mean square amplitude of the shape fluctuation -- an equal-time correlation -- of an almost planar fluid membrane immersed in a near-critical binary fluid mixture. One fluid component is usually preferentially attracted by…
These lectures deal with our current knowledge of the matter distribution in the universe, focusing on how this is studied via the large-scale structure seen in galaxy surveys. We first assemble the necessary basics needed to understand the…
We study the effect of global topology of the spatial geometry on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) for closed flat and closed hyperbolic models in which the spatial hypersurface is multiply connected. If the CMB temperature…
In the modulated reheating scenario, the field that drives inflation has a spatially varying decay rate, and the resulting inhomogeneous reheating process generates adiabatic perturbations. We examine the statistical properties of the…
We study cosmological perturbations in the case that present-day matter consists of a mixture of inflaton and curvaton decay products. We calculate how the curvaton perturbations are transferred to its decay products in the general case…
We present a new approach to gauge-invariant cosmological perturbations at second order, which is also covariant. We examine two cases in particular for a dust Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker model of any curvature: we investigate…
We study non-Gaussianity of density perturbations generated by an axionic curvaton, focusing on the case that the curvaton sits near the hilltop of the potential during inflation. Such hilltop curvatons can generate a red-tilted density…
We calculate the curvature power spectrum sourced by spectator fields that are excited repeatedly and non-adiabatically during inflation. In the absence of detailed information of the nature of spectator field interactions, we consider an…
We propose a new mechanism to generate density perturbations in inflationary models. Spatial fluctuations in the decay rate of the inflaton field to ordinary matter lead to fluctuations in the reheating temperature. We argue that in most…
We revisit the question of whether fluctuations in hydrodynamical, adiabatical matter could explain the observed structures in our Universe. We consider matter with variable equation of state $w=p_0/\ep_0$ and a concomitant (under the…
The cosmic web is a complex spatial pattern of walls, filaments, cluster nodes and underdense void regions. It emerged through gravitational amplification from the Gaussian primordial density field. Here we infer analytical expressions for…
The combination of detections of anisotropy in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and observations of the large-scale distribution of galaxies probes the primordial density fluctuations of the universe on spatial scales varying by…
We establish purely geometric or metric-based criteria for the validity of the separate universe ansatz, under which the evolution of small-scale observables in a long-wavelength perturbation is indistinguishable from a separate…
We review the formalism and applications of non-linear perturbation theory (PT) to understanding the large-scale structure of the Universe. We first discuss the dynamics of gravitational instability, from the linear to the non-linear…
We discuss how primordial non-Gaussianity of the curvature perturbation helps to constrain models of the early universe. Observations are consistent with Gaussian initial conditions, compatible with the predictions of the simplest models of…
If the entire post-inflationary patch is large compared to our Hubble volume even a small level of non-Gaussianity can cause statistics of the primordial curvature field in our Hubble volume to be biased by mode-coupling. We explicitly…
Averaging in general relativity is a complicated operation, due to the general covariance of the theory and the non-linearity of Einstein's equations. The latter of these ensures that smoothing spacetime over cosmological scales does not…
Is gravitational growth responsible for the observed large scale structure in the universe? Do we need non-gaussian initial conditions or non-gravitational physics to explain the large scale features traced by galaxy surveys? I will briefly…
We derive a generalized equation for the evolution of tensor perturbations in a cosmological background, taking into account higher-curvature contributions and a tree-level coupling to the dilaton in the string frame. The equation is…