Related papers: Amplification of Vacuum Fluctuations in String Cos…
Cosmic strings provide a radically different paradigm for the formation of structure to the prevailing inflationary one. They afford some extra technical complications: for example, the calculation of the power spectrum of matter and…
Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects which could have been formed in the early stages of our Universe. They triggered a lot of interest, mainly for their cosmological implications: they could offer an alternative to…
Models of inflation in a gravitational background with an anisotropic space-time scaling are studied. The background is a higher-dimensional Lifshitz throat with the anisotropy scaling $z\neq 1$. After the dimensional reduction, the…
Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension--the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation--which…
If inflation scale is high, light scalars acquire large quantum fluctuations during inflation.If sufficiently long-lived, they will give rise to CDM isocurvature perturbations, which are highly constrained by the Planck data. Focusing on…
High-scale string inflationary models are in well-known tension with low-energy supersymmetry. A promising solution involves models where the inflaton is the volume of the extra dimensions so that the gravitino mass relaxes from large…
We investigate the anisotropies of the stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) produced by cosmic strings associated with the spontaneous U(1) symmetry breaking of Grand Unified Theory, which happens at the onset of inflation. The…
We show that it is possible to combine an early phase of String Gas Cosmology which can explain the origin of the observed structures on cosmological scales with a short later period of power law inflation which creates spatial flatness.…
We analyze all individual cosmic strings of various lengths in a large ensemble of the global cosmic string networks in the post-inflationary scenario, obtained from numerical simulations on a discrete lattice with $N^3 = 4096^3$. A strong…
String models can produce successful inflationary scenarios in the context of brane collisions and in many of these models cosmic strings may also be produced. In scenarios such as KKLMMT the string contribution is naturally predicted to be…
In cosmological models where local cosmic strings are formed at the end of a period of inflation, the perturbations are seeded both by the defects and by the quantum fluctuations. In a subset of these models, for example those based on…
It is stressed that the kinematical problems of the standard cosmological model can be solved by a phase of accelerated contraction of the cosmic scale factor. Such a behaviour is only a particular case of a more general ``pre-big-bang"…
Loop quantum cosmology provides an efficient framework to study the evolution of the Universe beyond the classical Big Bang paradigm. Because of holonomy corrections, the singularity is replaced by a "bounce". The dynamics of the background…
A cosmic string network created during an inflationary stage in the early Universe - here defined as i-string network - is expected to enter a transient stretching regime during inflation, in which its characteristic length is stretched to…
String cosmology models predict a relic background of gravitational-wave (GW) radiation in the early universe. The GW energy spectrum of radiated power increases rapidly with the frequency, and therefore it becomes a potential and…
Precise measurements of the microwave background anisotropy have confirmed the inflationary picture of approximately scale invariant, Gaussian primordial adiabatic density perturbations. However, there are some anomalies that suggest a…
In a class of non-singular cosmologies derived from higher-order corrections to the low-energy bosonic string action, we derive evolution equations for the most general cosmological scalar, vector and tensor perturbations. In the large…
Following a self-contained review of the basics of the theory of cosmological perturbations, we discuss why the conclusions reached in the recent paper by Kaloper et al are too pessimistic estimates of the amplitude of possible imprints of…
Inflationary cosmology has provided a predictive and phenomenologically very successful scenario for early universe cosmology. Attempts to implement inflation using scalar fields, however, lead to models with serious conceptual problems. I…
The mean spectrum and burst statistics of gravitational waves produced by a cosmological population of cosmic string loops are estimated using analytic approximations, calibrated with earlier simulations. Formulas are derived showing the…