Related papers: Holography, Diffeomorphisms, and Scaling Violation…
The fine-structure constant, $\alpha$, controls the strength of the electromagnetic interaction. There are extensions of the standard model in which $\alpha$ is dynamical on cosmological length and time-scales. The physics of the cosmic…
We study the dynamics of scalar metric fluctuations in a non-perturbative variational formalism recently introduced, by which the dynamics of an geometrical scalar field $\theta$, describes the quantum geometrical effects on a Weylian-like…
We study 1-loop corrections to the primordial stochastic background of gravitational waves produced during inflation. While in single-clock, at the leading order in slow-roll, quantum corrections keep the amplitude scale-free this is not…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…
We calculate the primordial spectrum of scalar perturbations of the 3-form inflation and we find that the curvature perturbations decay at late times. As as result, although a non-minimally coupled massive 3-form field may drive inflation…
Using the relation between diffeomorphisms in the bulk and Weyl transformations on the boundary we study the Weyl transformation properties of the bulk metric on shell and of the boundary action. We obtain a universal formula for one of the…
Recent released WMAP data show a low value of quadrupole in the CMB temperature fluctuations, which confirms the early observations by COBE. In this paper, a scenario, in which a contracting phase is followed by an inflationary phase, is…
We extend to 5D an approach of a 4D non-perturbative formalism to study scalar metric fluctuations of a 5D Riemann-flat de Sitter background metric. In contrast with the results obtained in 4D, the spectrum of cosmological scalar metric…
We examine the spectrum of inflaton fluctuations resulting from any given long period of exponential inflation. Infrared and ultraviolet divergences in the inflaton dispersion summed over all modes do not appear in our approach. We show how…
We compute the spectrum of scalar and tensor metric perturbations generated, as amplified vacuum fluctuations, during an epoch of dilaton-driven inflation of the type occurring naturally in string cosmology. In the tensor case the…
Inflationary cosmological perturbations of quantum-mechanical origin generically interact with all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe. Therefore, they must be viewed as an open quantum system in interaction with an…
We present the first computation of the cosmological perturbations generated during inflation up to second order in deviations from the homogeneous background solution. Our results, which fully account for the inflaton self-interactions as…
Holographic considerations may provide a glimpse of quantum gravity beyond what is currently accessible by other means. Here we apply holography to inflationary cosmology. We argue that the appropriate holographic bound on the total entropy…
In inflationary models where the source of scalar perturbations is not the inflaton, but one or more scalars with negligible coupling with the inflaton, the resulting perturbations are not only scale invariant, but fully conformally…
Recent analysis of the WMAP and Planck data have shown the presence of a dip and a bump in the spectrum of primordial perturbations at the scales $k=0.002$ Mpc${}^{-1}$ and $k=0.0035$ Mpc${}^{-1}$ respectively. We analyze for the first time…
While attempting to connect inflationary theories to observational physics, a potential difficulty is the degeneracy problem: a single set of observables maps to a range of different inflaton potentials. Two important classes of models…
By decomposing the CMB temperature fluctuations \emph{squared} into spherical harmonics, we can define the \emph{CMB power multipoles} as the fundamental observables to quantify any generic modulations in the CMB. This allows for simple…
The usual description of inflationary fluctuations uses the framework of quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, in which quantum fluctuations are superimposed on a classical background spacetime. Even for large fluctuations, such…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
I present recent work aimed at showing how currently competing theories of the early universe leave their imprint on the temperature anisotropies of the CMB radiation. We consider the 3-point correlation function, as well as the inherent…