Related papers: Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays and Inflation
We propose a qualitatively new mechanism for generating cosmological fluctuations from inflation. The non-equilibrium excitation of interacting scalar fields often evolves into infra-red (IR) and ultra-violet (UV) cascading, resulting in an…
It is difficult for conventional sources to accelerate cosmic ray particles to the highest energies that have been observed. Topological defects such as monopoles and strings overcome this difficulty, because their natural energy scale is…
The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the…
Cosmic rays are charged relativistic particles that reach the Earth with extremely high energies, providing striking evidence of the existence of effective accelerators in the Universe. Below an energy around $\sim 10^{17}$ eV cosmic rays…
The origin of cosmic rays with energies higher than 10$^{20}$ eV remains a mystery. Accelerating particles up to these energies is a challenge even for the most energetic astrophysical objects known. While the isotropy in arrival directions…
Preheating after inflation may over-produce primordial black holes (PBH's) in many regions of parameter space. As an example we study two-field models with a massless self-interacting inflaton, taking into account second order field and…
The absence of the expected GZK cutoff strongly challenges the notion that the highest-energy cosmic rays are of distant extragalactic origin. We discuss the possibility that these ultra-high-energy events originate in our Galaxy and…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
The process of quantum creation of a qusihomogeneous inflationary universe near a cosmological singularity is considered. It is shown that during the evolution quantum fluctuations of spatial topologies increase and the universe acquires…
Stable, quantized gravitational bound states of primordial black holes called Holeums could have been produced in the early universe and could be a component of the Super Heavy Dark Matter (SHDM) present in galactic halos. We show that…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
The detection of High Energy Cosmic Rays (HECR) with energies around and beyond GZK expected cutoff has introduced the idea of existence of a decaying Ultra Heavy Dark Matter (UHDM). If this type of particles make a substantial part of the…
The dynamics of preheating after inflation has not been clearly understood yet.In particular, the issue of the generation of metric perturbations during preheating on super-horizon scale is still unsettled. Large scale perturbations may…
It is assumed that during inflation, all energy was contained in a slow-rolling inflaton field $\phi$. The particles constituting the Universe are created due to interactions with the field $\phi$ coherently oscillating after inflation. The…
We study the observable implications of an incomplete first order phase transition during inflation. In such a phase transition, the nucleated bubbles do not percolate and instead are continuously produced until the onset of reheating. The…
The origin of ultra high energy cosmic rays promises to lead us to a deeper understanding of the structure of matter. This is possible through the study of particle collisions at center-of-mass energies in interactions far larger than…
High energy cosmic rays allow probing phenomena that are inacessible to accelerators. Observation of cosmic rays, presumebly protons, with energies beyond $4 \times 10^{19} eV$, the so-called Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin (GZK) cut-off, give…
If Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs) with E>4 10^{19} eV originate from BL Lacertae at cosmological distances as suggested by recent studies, the absence of the GZK cutoff can not be reconciled with Standard-Model particle properties.…
Heavy-ion colliders have revealed the process of "fast thermalization". This experimental breakthrough has led to new theoretical tools to study the thermalization process at both weak and strong coupling. We apply this to the reheating…
A variety of mechanisms in the early Universe lead to the generation of gravitational waves (GWs). We introduce here a novel source of GWs generated by vacuum fluctuations after inflation. Given that gravitons are minimally coupled…