Related papers: Simple quantum cosmology: Vacuum energy and initia…
In cosmology based on general relativity, the universe is modeled as a fluid. The transition from the Einstein field equation to its large-scale (cosmological) version is thus analogous to the transition, for a system consisting of a large…
We consider the evolution of a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker Universe, filled with a causal bulk viscous cosmological fluid, in the presence of variable gravitational and cosmological constants. The basic equation for the Hubble…
Wheeler's conjectured "spacetime foam" -- large quantum fluctuations of spacetime at the Planck scale -- could have important implications for quantum gravity, perhaps even explaining why the cosmological constant seems so small. Here I…
The idea that the cosmological term, Lambda, should be a time dependent quantity in cosmology is a most natural one. It is difficult to conceive an expanding universe with a strictly constant vacuum energy density, namely one that has…
We consider an ultra-light scalar field with a mass comparable to (or lighter than) the Hubble parameter of the present universe, and calculate the time evolution of the energy-momentum tensor of the vacuum fluctuations generated during and…
We develop a quantum-cosmological framework in which the inflationary potential emerges from the structure of the wave function of the universe rather than being postulated. Starting from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for a flat…
Suppose that the early Universe starts with a quantum spacetime originated cosmological $\Lambda$-term at the Planck scale $M_{\rm pl}$. The cosmological energy density $\rho_{_{_\Lambda}}$ drives inflation and simultaneously reduces its…
In hep-th/0506040 we discussed a classically constrained model of gravity. This theory contains known solutions of General Relativity (GR), and admits solutions that are absent in GR. Here we study cosmological implications of some of these…
A novel scalar field free approach to cosmic inflation is presented. The inflationary Universe and the radiation dominated Universe are shown, within the framework of unified brane cosmology, to be two different phases governed by one and…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive vacuum energy density and negative vacuum pressure. A strong candidate is the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations of General Relativity. The vacuum dark energy…
In a unified picture both inflation and present dynamical dark energy arise from the same scalar field. The history of the Universe describes a crossover from a scale invariant "past fixed point" where all particles are massless, to a…
We propose a novel scenario to explain the small cosmological constant (CC) by a finely tuned inflaton potential. The tuned shape is stable under radiative corrections, and our setup is technically natural. The peculiar po- tential…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ is a free parameter in Einstein's equations of gravity. We propose to fix its value with a boundary condition: test particles should be free when outside causal contact, e.g. at infinity. Under this…
We develop a cosmological theory in which the evolution of the universe is controlled by the cosmological constant and dominated by the associated vacuum energy. The universe starts as a classical de Sitter space with an infinite effective…
Eternal inflation arising from a potential landscape predicts that our universe is one realization of many possible cosmological histories. One way to access different cosmological histories is via the nucleation of bubble universes from a…
A proposal is made for the quantum state of the universe that has an initial state that is macroscopically time symmetric about a homogeneous, isotropic bounce of extremal volume and that at that bounce is microscopically in the ground…
We construct a model for the universe based on the existence of quantum fields at finite temperature in the background of Robertson-Walker spacetime in presence of a non-zero cosmological constant. We discuss the vacuum regime in the light…
We extend to multidimensional cosmology Vilenkin's prescription of tunnelling from nothing for the quantum origin of the observable Universe. Our model consists of a $D+4$-dimensional spacetime of topology ${\cal R}\times {\cal S}^3…
In this paper we investigate how the energy density due to a non-standard choice of initial vacuum affects the expansion of the universe during inflation. To do this we introduce source terms in the Friedmann equations making sure that we…
Possibly, the most general action in the background of isotropic and homogeneous space-time has been considered to study the quantum evolution of the early universe, apart from a cosmological constant. The hermiticity of the effective…