Related papers: Cosmic Defects
Recent developments in inflation model building, based on supersymmetry, have produced compelling models in which strings are produced at the end of inflation. In such models the cosmological perturbations are seeded both by the defects and…
I motivate and discuss some recent work on theories with varying constants, and consider some possible observational consequences and tests. Particular emphasis is given to models which can (almost) exactly mimic the predictions of standard…
Recently Hollands and Wald argued that inflation does not solve any of the major cosmological problems. We explain why we disagree with their arguments. They also proposed a new speculative mechanism of generation of density perturbations.…
The fundamental paradox of the incompatibility of the observed large-scale uniformity of the Universe with the fact that the age of the Universe is finite is overcome by the introduction of an initial a period of superluminal expansion of…
The language and methods of algebraic topology, particularly homotopy theory, have been extensively used in the study of the identification, the classification and the evolution of defects. Topological methods provide the means for the…
In this talk we discuss three different issues. First of all, there exist several proposals how to solve cosmological problems by adiabatic expansion of the Universe, without any use of inflation. We explain why these models do not solve…
We consider dynamical models of supersymmetry breaking which naturally incorporate cosmological inflation. The inflaton plays an inevitable role in dynamical SUSY breaking and the hierarchical scales of inflation and SUSY breaking are…
We are on the verge of the first precision testing of the inflationary cosmology as a model for the origin of structure in the Universe. I review the key predictions of inflation which can be used as observational tests, in the sense of…
Whether we live in a spatially finite universe, and what its shape and size may be, are among the fundamental long-standing questions in cosmology. These questions of topological nature have become particularly topical, given the wealth of…
Many theories of the early universe predict the existence of a multiverse where bubbles continuously nucleate giving rise to observers in their interior. In this paper, we point out that topological defects of several dimensionalities will…
In the framework of Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theories (SUSY GUTs), the universe undergoes a cascade of symmetry breakings, during which topological defects can be formed. We address the question of the probability of cosmic string…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…
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…
We study topological defects with a general structure in higher-dimensional cosmological backgrounds described by a set of angle deficit parameters. As special cases, they include higher-dimensional generalizations of cosmic strings and…
I review the current status of the theory of Cosmic Inflation. My discussion covers the motivation and implementation of the idea, as well as an analysis of recent successes and open questions. There is a special discussion of the physics…
The study of topology in solids is undergoing a renaissance following renewed interest in the properties of ferroic domain walls as well as recent discoveries regarding topological insulators and skyrmionic lattices. Each of these systems…
We present a simplified review of inflationary cosmology across various modified gravity theories. These include models based on curvature, torsion, and non-metricity. We explore how scalar fields interact with different geometric…
We consider a network of topological defects which can partly decay into neutrinos, photons, baryons, or Cold Dark Matter. We find that the degree-scale amplitude of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies as well as the shape of…
We extend the `topological inflation' of Linde and Vilenkin to {\em unstable} monopoles. This allows the monopole to decay; not inflating eternally, as topological inflation demands. Such a situation happens naturally in some Grand Unified…
A huge value of cosmological constant characteristic for the particle physics and the inflation of early Universe are inherently related to each other: one can construct a fine-tuned superpotential, which produces a flat potential of…