Related papers: Child universes UV regularization?
The hypothesis that the Universe underwent a period of exponential expansion at very early times has become the most popular theory of the early Universe. Not only does it solve some of the problems of standard big bang cosmology, but it…
Baby universes (inflationary or non--inflationary) are regions of spacetime that disconnect from the original ambient spacetime, which we take to be asymptotically flat spacetime. A particular kind of baby universe solution, involving…
The observable universe is fundamentally inhomogeneous and anisotropic. Quantum description of the generation of these inhomogeneities and anisotropies is ill-understood and unsatisfactory. After providing a brief account of the standard…
Vacuum bubbles may nucleate and expand during the inflationary epoch in the early universe. After inflation ends, the bubbles quickly dissipate their kinetic energy; they come to rest with respect to the Hubble flow and eventually form…
If our universe was born as a baby universe on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole existing in a parent universe, then the corresponding white hole at rest provides the absolute frame of reference in the universe. In this…
Higher order curvature gravity has recently received a lot of attention due to the fact that it gives rise to cosmological models which seem capable of solving dark energy and quintessence issues without using "ad hoc" scalar fields. Such…
In a class of generalized gravity theories with general couplings between the scalar field and the scalar curvature in the Lagrangian, we can describe the quantum generation and the classical evolution of both the scalar and tensor…
The standard theory of cosmic structure formation posits that the present-day rich structure of the Universe developed through gravitational amplification of tiny matter density fluctuations generated in its very early history. Recent…
The existence of magnetic fields in the universe is unmistakable. They are observed at all scales from stars to galaxy clusters. However, the origin of these fields remains enigmatic. It is believed that magnetic field seeds may have…
We examine from first principles one of the basic assumptions of modern quantum theories of structure formation in the early universe, i.e., the conditions upon which fluctuations of a quantum field may transmute into classical stochastic…
The gravitational collapse and the birth of a new universe are considered in terms of quantum mechanics. Transitions from annihilation of matter to deflation in the collapse and from inflation to creation of matter in the birth of a…
Gravitational waves (GWs) are produced by colliding particles through the gravitational analogue of electromagnetic bremsstrahlung. We calculate the contribution of free-free emission in the radiation-dominated Universe to the stochastic GW…
The origin of seed perturbations in the Universe is studied within the framework of a specific minisuperspace model. It is shown that the `creation' of the Universe as a result of a quantum transition from a flat empty spacetime would lead…
Many cosmological observables of interest derive from primordial vacuum fluctuations evolved to late times. These observables represent statistical draws from some underlying quantum or statistical field theoretic framework where infinities…
We consider the quantum birth of a hot FRW universe from a vacuum-dominated quantum fluctuation with admixture of radiation and strings, which correspond to quantum tunnelling from a discrete energy level with a non-zero temperature. The…
Quantum gravity effects are traditionally tied to short distances and high energies. In this essay we argue that, perhaps surprisingly, quantum gravity may have important consequences for the phenomenology of the infrared. We center our…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
In the case of a metastable electroweak vacuum the quantum corrected effective potential plays a crucial role in the potential instability of the Standard Model. In the Early Universe, in particular during inflation and reheating, this…
We here conjecture that two much-studied aspects of quantum gravity, dimensional flow and spacetime fuzziness, might be deeply connected. We illustrate the mechanism, providing first evidence in support of our conjecture, by working within…
One of the most dramatic consequences of low-scale (~1 TeV) quantum gravity would be copious production of mini black holes at future accelerators and in ultra-high-energy cosmic ray interactions. Hawking radiation of these black holes is…