Related papers: Entropy Bounds and String Cosmology

The possibility of having an extension of the cosmological standard model with a Hubble expansion rate $H$ constrained to a finite interval is considered. Two periods of accelerated expansion arise naturally when the Hubble expansion rate…

We demonstrate that the strict upper bounds on the energy scale of inflation and on the tensor-to-scalar ratio can be somewhat relaxed if we assume that - after an initial period of slow rolling when scales probed today in CMB experiments…

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…

Inflationary cosmology predicts that the particle horizon should be generically much bigger than the present-day Hubble radius, $1/H_0$. This implies a special regime of super-Hubble scale energy density fluctuations imprinted on the cosmic…

The cosmic string is a useful probe of the early Universe and may give us a clue to physics at high energy scales where any artificial particle accelerators cannot reach. Although one of the most promising tools is the cosmic microwave…

An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…

Many inflating spacetimes are likely to violate the weak energy condition, a key assumption of singularity theorems. Here we offer a simple kinematical argument, requiring no energy condition, that a cosmological model which is inflating --…

In this paper we point out that the spacetime uncertainty relation proposed for string theory has strong cosmological implications that can solve the flatness problem and the horizon problem without the need of inflation. We make minimal…

In generic models of cosmological inflation, quantum fluctuations strongly influence the spacetime metric and produce infinitely many regions where the end of inflation (reheating) is delayed until arbitrarily late times. The geometry of…

The fluctuations in the inflaton field at the end of inflation which seed the density perturbations are prepared in a pure quantum state. It is generally assumed that some physics causes this pure state to decohere so that it should be…

We investigate the behavior of the entanglement entropy of space in the primordial phase of the universe before the beginning of cosmic inflation. We argue that in this phase the entanglement entropy of a region of space grows from a…

Cosmic strings, a hot subject in the 1980's and early 1990's, lost its appeal when it was found that it leads to inconsistencies in the power spectrum of the measured cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies. However,…

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…

The conditions for validity of the Causal Entropy Bound (CEB) are verified in the context of non-singular cosmologies with classical sources. It is shown that they are the same conditions that were previously found to guarantee validity of…

I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…

In this work, we study the applications of entropy bounds in two toy cosmological models with particle production (annihilation), i.e., a radiation-dominated universe and a dust-dominated universe. We consider the co-moving volume and the…

The entropy of the observable universe is increasing. Thus, at earlier times the entropy was lower. However, the cosmic microwave background radiation reveals an apparently high entropy universe close to thermal and chemical equilibrium. A…

If the inflationary era is preceded by a radiation dominated era in which the inflaton too was in thermal equilibrium at some very early time then the CMB data places an upper bound on the comoving temperature of the (decoupled) inflaton…

We argue that the total observable entropy is bounded by the inverse of the cosmological constant. This holds for all space-times with a positive cosmological constant, including cosmologies dominated by ordinary matter, and recollapsing…

I discuss the Boltzmann-Penrose question of why the initial conditions for cosmology have low entropy. The modern version of Boltzmann's answer to this question, due to Dyson, Kleban and Susskind, seems to imply that the typical intelligent…