Related papers: Many worlds in one
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
We develop a possible cosmology for a Universe with n additional spatial dimensions of variable scale, and an associated scalar field, the radion, which is distinct from the field responsible for inflation, the inflaton. Based on a…
Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread…
The microscopic quantum field theory origins of warm inflation dynamics are reviewed. The warm inflation scenario is first described along with its results, predictions and comparison with the standard cold inflation scenario. The basics of…
It is very difficult to obtain a realistic model of a closed inflationary universe. Even if one fine-tunes the total number of e-folds to be sufficiently small, the resulting universe typically has large density perturbations on the scale…
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…
While cosmological inflation can erase primordial inhomogeneities, it is possible that inflation may not begin in a significantly inhomogeneous universe. This issue is particularly pressing in multifield scenarios, where even the…
We give a consistent description of how the inflationary Universe emerges in quantum cosmology. This involves two steps: Firstly, it is shown that a sensible probability peak can be obtained from the cosmological wave function. This is…
Loop quantum cosmology provides a nice solution of avoiding the big bang singularity through a big bounce mechanism in the high energy region. In loop quantum cosmology an inflationary universe is emergent after the big bounce, no matter…
When did the universe thermalize? In this talk I review the status of this issue and its importance in establishing the expected properties of dark matter, the growth of large-scale structure, and the viability of inflation models when…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
Eternally inflating universes can contain large thermalized regions with different values of the constants of Nature and with different density fluctuation spectra. To find the probability for a `typical' observer to detect a certain set of…
A scale-invariant universe can have a period of accelerated expansion at early times: inflation. We use a frame-invariant approach to calculate inflationary observables in a scale invariant theory of gravity involving two scalar fields -…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
Our universe may be contained in one among a diverging number of bubbles that nucleate within an eternally inflating multiverse. A promising measure to regulate the diverging spacetime volume of such a multiverse is the scale-factor cutoff,…
Recent high precision data by WMAP and SDSS have provided strong evidence to suggest that the universe is nearly flat. They are also making it possible to probe the topology of the universe. Motivated by these results, we have recently…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
In the inflationary scenario all the matter constituting the universe was created from the process of reheating after inflation. Recent development of the theory of reheating is briefly reviewed. The list of topics includes elementary…
Does inflation provide a compelling explanation for why the universe is so large, so flat, and so old, and a predictive theory of density perturbations? In this brief contribution (based on the role of the author as moderator of the…