Related papers: Quantum cosmology and eternal inflation
Inflationary Cosmology makes the universe ``eternal" and provides for recurrent universe creation, ad infinitum -- making it also plausible to assume that ``our" Big Bang was also preceeded by others, etc.. However, GR tells us that in the…
I give a general review of the history of inflationary cosmology and of its present status.
Inflationary cosmology explains the homogeneity and large-scale structure of the universe through a brief epoch of accelerated expansion following the Big Bang. Cyclic cosmologies, in contrast, describe a universe undergoing successive…
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of inflation and dark energy in terms of a single scalar degree of freedom, the cosmon. We present here a comprehensive overview of this appealing paradigm, highlighting its key…
This thesis presents a theoretical investigation into the quantum field theoretic aspects of quantum correlations and decoherence in the cosmological spacetimes. We shall focus on the inflationary or dark energy dominated phase of the…
Motivated by the lessons of black hole complementarity, we develop a causal patch description of eternal inflation. We argue that an observer cannot ascribe a semiclassical geometry to regions outside his horizon, because the large-scale…
Recent advances in observational cosmology are changing the way we view the nature of time. In general relativity, the freedom in choosing a time hypersurface has hampered the implementation of the theory. Fortunately, Hamilton-Jacobi…
Loop quantum cosmology provides an efficient framework to study the evolution of the Universe beyond the classical Big Bang paradigm. Because of holonomy corrections, the singularity is replaced by a "bounce". The dynamics of the background…
We study the decay of the cosmological constant in two spacetime dimensions through production of pairs. We show that the same nucleation process looks as quantum mechanical tunneling (instanton) to one Killing observer and as thermal…
In spite of its great phenomenological success, current models of scalar field-driven inflation suffer from important unresolved conceptual issues. New fundamental physics will be required to address these questions. String theory is a…
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…
There are several regimes in chaotic inflationary cosmology where some part of the system is classical and some other quantum. I describe how to deal with such systems and how to disentangle their dynamics into classical behaviour and…
Cosmic bubble collisions provide an important possible observational window on the dynamics of eternal inflation. In eternal inflation, our observable universe is contained in one of many bubbles formed from an inflating metastable vacuum.…
In light of the recent swampland conjectures, we explore quantum cosmology and eternal inflation beyond the slow roll regime. We consider a model of a closed universe with a scalar field $\phi$ in the framework of tunneling approach to…
The very basics of cosmological inflation are discussed. We derive the equations of motion for the inflaton field, introduce the slow-roll parameters, and present the computation of the inflationary perturbations and their connection to the…
This study reviews the advances made in inflationary theory, especially regarding the seeming disparity between inflation energy and dark energy, and their significance to cosmic evolution as a whole. I attempt to connect the two sources of…
Here $f(R)$-cosmology is discussed using a different approach. This model explains early-inflation, emergence of cosmic background radiation at the exit from inflation, cosmic deceleration during radiation-dominance followed by deceleration…
We investigate how various inflationary and bouncing cosmologies can be realized by imperfect fluids with a generalized equation of state, in the context of both classical and loop quantum cosmology. With regards to the inflationary…
Inflationary cosmology is reviewed. Particular attention is given to processes of creation.
This paper discusses the problem of inflation in the context of Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Cosmology. We show how, after a simple change of variables, one can quantize the problem in a way which parallels the classical discussion. The…