Related papers: Gravity's rainbow
Extended inflation is a promising new approach to implementing the inflationary universe scenario. This paper reviews recent advances including a new, more robust mechanism for ending extended inflation, a new prediction for the density…
The inflationary paradigm is extremely successful regarding predictions of temperature anisotropies in the CMB. However, inflation also makes predictions for a CMB B-mode polarization, which has not been detected. Moreover, the standard…
Phase transitions in the early universe can readily create an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that such a background necessarily contains anisotropies analogous to those of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
We discuss the influence of gravitational waves (GWs) upon the polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). We show how to compute the {\em rms} temperature anisotropy and polarisation of the CMBR induced by GWs of…
An alternative to the standard cold dark matter model has been recently proposed in which a significant fraction of the energy density of the universe is due to a dynamical scalar field ($Q$) whose effective equation-of-state differs from…
We point out three correlated predictions of the axion monodromy inflation model: large amplitude of gravitational waves, suppression of power on horizon scales and on scales relevant for the formation of dwarf galaxies. While these…
The theoretical basis for the prediction of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background is very well developed. Very low amplitude density and temperature perturbations produce small gravitational effects, leading to an anisotropy that…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy power on the largest angular scales observed both by WMAP and COBE DMR appears to be lower than the one predicted by the standard model of cosmology with almost scale free primordial…
The genuine quantum gravity effects can already be around us. It is likely that the observed large-angular-scale anisotropies in the microwave background radiation are induced by cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin. Such…
We present theoretical and observational studies of non-Gaussian fluctuations in CMB, by using the angular bispectrum and trispectrum. We predict the primary angular bispectrum from inflation, and forecast how well we can measure the…
Rotational invariance is a well-established feature of low-energy physics. Violations of this symmetry must be extremely small today, but could have been larger in earlier epochs. In this paper we examine the consequences of a small…
I present a briefly summary of the current status of inflationary models versus topological defects scenarios, as the mechanisms which could have induced the initial density perturbations, which left an imprint on the cosmic microwave…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
Cosmological phase transitions in the primordial universe can produce anisotropic stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (GWB), similar to the cosmic microwave background (CMB). For adiabatic perturbations, the fluctuations in GWB follow…
Cosmological perturbations generated quantum-mechanically (as a particular case, during inflation) possess statistical properties of squeezed quantum states. The power spectra of the perturbations are modulated and the angular distribution…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…
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…
In principle, the tensor metric (gravity-wave) perturbations that arise in inflationary models can, beyond probing the underlying inflationary model, provide information about the Universe: ionization history, presence of a cosmological…
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…
It is conjectured that inflation, taking account of quantum gravity, leads to a discrete spectrum of cosmological perturbations, instead of the continuous Gaussian spectrum predicted by standard field theory in an unquantized background.…