Related papers: Echoes of Gravity
Astrophysical sources emit gravitational waves in a large variety of processes occurred since the beginning of star and galaxy formation. These waves permeate our high redshift Universe, and form a background which is the result of the…
We have investigated the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy in closed multiply connected universes (flat and hyperbolic) with low matter density. We show that the COBE constraints on these low matter density models with…
One of the predictions from simple inflation models is a stochastic background of gravitational waves (or literally what is called the Primordial Gravitational Waves (\textbf{PGW})) with a nearly scale--invariant spectrum. In this work, we…
Precision measurements of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and of the clustering of large-scale structure have supposedly confirmed that the primordial density perturbation has a (nearly) scale-invariant spectrum. However…
Gravitational wave (GW) backgrounds of cosmological origin are expected to be nearly isotropic, with small anisotropies resembling those of the cosmic microwave background. We analyse the case of a scalar-induced GW background and clarify…
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…
We question the global universe isotropy by probing the alignment of local structures in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The original method proposed relies on a steerable wavelet decomposition of the CMB signal on the…
We present an analysis of the cosmological evolution of matter sources with small anisotropic pressures. This includes electric and magnetic fields, collisionless relativistic particles, gravitons, antisymmetric axion fields in low-energy…
Primordial black holes, if considered to constitute a significant fraction of cold dark matter, trace the inhomogeneous large-scale structure of the Universe. Consequently, the stochastic gravitational-wave background, originating from…
If current ideas about unified field theories are correct, macroscopic cosmic defects may well exist. The observation of such an entity would have enormous significance for our understanding of fundamental physics. This paper points out a…
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…
Gravitational waves constitute a powerful probe of the underlying theory of gravity. In extensions of general relativity, additional degrees of freedom, such as scalar fields in the gravitational sector, can modify their propagation through…
Inflation generates gravitational waves, which may be observable in the low multipoles of the cosmic microwave background (cmb) anisotropy but only if the inflaton field variation is at least of order the Planck scale. Such a large…
We show the existence of spatially homogeneous but anisotropic cosmological models whose cosmic microwave background temperature is exactly isotropic at one instant of time but whose rate of expansion is highly anisotropic. The existence of…
In a landscape of compactifications with different numbers of macroscopic dimensions, it is possible that our universe has nucleated from a vacuum where some of our four large dimensions were compact while other, now compact, directions…
If the large-angular-scale anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation is caused by the long-wavelength cosmological perturbations of quantum mechanical origin, they are, most likely, gravitational waves, rather than density…
Quantum fluctuations of the gravitational field in the early Universe, amplified by inflation, produce a primordial gravitational-wave background across a broad frequency band. We derive constraints on the spectrum of this gravitational…
We study the effect of a stochastic background of gravitational waves on the gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. It has been shown that matter density inhomogeneities produce a smoothing of the acoustic…
The quantum gravity processes that have taken place in the very early Universe are probably responsible for the observed large-scale cosmological perturbations. The comparison of the theory with the detected microwave background…
We are now beginning to learn detailed information about cosmological parameters from the shapes of the matter and radiation power spectra, together with their relative normalization. As more high quality data are gathered from galaxy…