Related papers: Open inflation from quantum cosmology with a stron…
We contrast the initial condition requirements of various contemporary cosmological models, including inflationary and bouncing cosmologies. Various proposals such as Hartle-Hawking's no boundary, or Tunnelling boundary conditions are…
The tunneling hamiltonian has proven to be a useful method in many body physics to treat particle tunneling between different states represented as wave functions. Here we apply a generalization of a way we formed appropriate wave…
We speculate that the early Universe was inside a primordial black hole. The interior of the the black hole is a dS background and the two spacetimes are separated on the surface of black hole's event horizon. We argue that this picture…
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…
We present the first quantum field theory model of inflation that is renormalizable in the matter sector, with a super-Hubble inflaton mass and sub-Planckian field excursions, which is thus technically natural and consistent with a…
We develop in this thesis the principles governing the production of our universe's primordial inhomogeneities during its early phase of inflation. As a guiding thread we ask what physics during inflation can lead to perturbations so large…
The purpose of these lectures is to give a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the production of primordial perturbations, as well as a review of some of the latest developments in this domain. After a short introduction, we review…
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
We consider the classical evolution of the inflaton field $\phi(t)$ and the Hubble parameter $H(t)$ in homogeneous and isotropic single-field inflation models. Under an extremely broad assumption, we show that the universe generically…
We revisit an inflationary scenario in which primordial inhomogeneities arise from a quantum collapse, a stochastic mechanism described in the context of quantum collapse theories in its continuous version and within semiclassical gravity.…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
Using numerical solutions of the full Einstein field equations coupled to a scalar inflaton field in 3+1 dimensions, we study the conditions under which a universe that is initially expanding, highly inhomogeneous and dominated by gradient…
In this work, we study constant-roll inflation driven by a scalar field with non-minimal derivative coupling to gravity, via the Einstein tensor. This model contains a free parameter, $\eta$, which quantifies the non-minimal derivative…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
We propose a novel enhancement mechanism of the curvature perturbations in the nonminimal derivative coupling inflation model with a coupling parameter related to the inflaton field. By considering a special form of the coupling parameter…
We consider the renormalization group improvement in the theory of the Standard Model Higgs boson playing the role of an inflaton with a strong non-minimal coupling to gravity. It suggests the range of the Higgs mass $135.6 {\rm GeV}…
Motivated by the recent `Higgs-inflation' scenario based on a single inflaton field, we consider more generic two-field inflation with non-minimal coupling term. The generic analytic expressions are derived for cosmological observables with…
The no-boundary proposal provides a compelling theory for the initial conditions of our universe. We study the implications of such initial conditions for ekpyrotic and cyclic cosmologies. These cosmologies allow for the existence of a new…
Eternal inflation produces pocket universes with all physically allowed vacua and histories. Some of these pocket universes might contain a phase of slow-roll inflation, some might undergo cycles of cosmological evolution and some might…