相关论文: Vacuum Choices and the Predictions of Inflation

Recent observations about the cosmic microwave background evidence a clear discrepancy between the scale of inflation and the Planck scale expected in the conventional inflationary picture, based on simple chaotic inflationary models. This…

In this paper we consider inflation as a probe of new physics near the string or Planck scale. We discuss how new physics can be captured by the choice of vacuum, and how this leads to modifications of the primordial spectrum as well as the…

According to most inflationary models, fluctuations that are of cosmological size today started out much smaller than any plausible cutoff length such as the string or Planck lengths. It has been shown that this could open an experimental…

We consider an inflationary scenario where the energy scale of inflation stems from gauge theory dynamics. We point out its generic implications on vacuum selection of our universe, in particular, on determination of spacetime symmetries…

We theoretically and observationally investigate different choices of initial conditions for the primordial mode function that are imposed during an epoch preceding inflation. By deriving predictions for the observables resulting from…

During inflation, primordial energy density fluctuations are created from approximate de Sitter vacuum quantum fluctuations redshifted out of the horizon after which they are frozen as perturbations in the background curvature. In this…

We investigate the modifications to inflationary observables that arise when adopting an $\alpha$-vacuum instead of the standard Bunch--Davies vacuum for quantum fluctuations during inflation. Within the Starobinsky inflationary model, we…

In order to calculate the power spectrum generated during a stage of inflation, we have to specify the quantum state of the inflaton perturbations, which is conventionally assumed to be the Bunch-Davies vacuum. We argue that this choice is…

I propose a new mechanism to account for the observed tiny but finite dark energy in terms of a non-Abelian Higgs theory, which has infinitely many perturbative vacua characterized by a winding number, in the framework of inflationary…

An elegant approach, which incorporates the effect of the stringy spacetime uncertainty relation, to calculate power spectra of fluctuations during inflation has been suggested by Brandenberger and Ho. In this approach, one of important…

If our universe underwent inflation, its entropy during the inflationary phase was substantially lower than it is today. Because a low-entropy state is less likely to be chosen randomly than a high-entropy one, inflation is unlikely to…

We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…

We compute the spectrum of cosmological perturbations in a scenario in which inflation is driven by radiation in a non-commutative space-time. In this scenario, the non-commutativity of space and time leads to a modified dispersion relation…

Inflationary models are generally credited with explaining the large scale homogeneity, isotropy, and flatness of our universe as well as accounting for the origin of structure (i.e., the deviations from exact homogeneity) in our universe.…

In the framework of Inflationary theory, the assumption that the quantum state of the perturbations is a non-vacuum state leads to a difficulty: non-vacuum initial states imply, in general, a large energy density of inflaton field quanta,…

During the inflationary phase of the early universe, quantum fluctuations in the vacuum generate particles as they stretch beyond the Hubble length. These fluctuations are thought to result in the density fluctuations and gravitational…

An investigation is undertaken into the properties and effects of a preinflationary era during at least part of which semiclassical gravity was valid. It is argued that if the Universe (or our part of it) was approximately homogeneous and…

We study an inflationary scenario with a vector impurity. We show that the universe undergoes anisotropic inflationary expansion due to a preferred direction determined by the vector. Using the slow-roll approximation, we find a formula to…

We study the effect of a non-trivial vacuum prescription on warm inflation observables, namely the power spectrum of the comoving curvature perturbation. Non-trivial choice of vacuum, can provide information about trans-Planckian physics.…

The pre-big bang scenario describes the evolution of the Universe from an initial state approaching the flat, cold, empty, string perturbative vacuum. The choice of such an initial state is suggested by the present state of our Universe if…