Recent data suggest that the Universe could be positively curved. Combined with an inflationary stage, this might lead to a curvature bounce instead of the Big Bang. The background evolution is presented, as a function of the parameters controlling the cosmic evolution. The primordial tensor spectrum is also calculated and possible observational fo...
Bouncing cosmologies can arise from various gravity theories. We model them through a singularity scattering map, as we call it, relating large scale geometries before and after the bounce. By classifying all suitably local maps we uncover universal laws (scaling of Kasner exponents, canonical transformation of matter). We study the singularity sca...
A close inspection of Zwicky's seminal papers on the dynamics of galaxy clusters reveals that the discrepancy discovered between the dynamical mass and the luminous mass of clusters has been widely overestimated in 1933 as a consequence of several factors, among which the excessive value of the Hubble constant $H_0$, then believed to be about seven...
Published in Nature Physics
In the early Universe, fluctuations in the neutrino density produced a distinct shift in the temporal phase of sound waves in the primordial plasma. The size of this phase shift has now been constrained through baryon acoustic oscillation data.
In approaches to quantum gravity, where smooth spacetime is an emergent approximation of a discrete Planckian fundamental structure, any effective smooth field theoretical description would miss part of the fundamental degrees of freedom and thus break unitarity. This is applicable also to trivial gravitational field (low energy) idealizations real...
Published in Nature Physics
Virtual photons emitted from strong-interaction matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions decay into electron–positron pairs, which provide information about the system’s properties.
Discovered almost forty years ago, inflation has become the leading paradigm for the early universe. Originally invented to avoid the fine-tuning puzzles of the standard model of cosmology, the so-called hot Big Bang phase, inflation has always been the subject of intense debates. In this article, after a brief review of the theoretical and observa...
We investigate the propagation of the scalar waves in the FLRW universes beginning with a Big Bang and ending with a Big Crunch, a Big Rip, a Big Brake or a Sudden Singularity. We obtain the sharp description of the asymptotics for the solutions of the linear Klein-Gordon equation, and similar results for the semilinear equation with a subcritical ...
Emergent cosmological models, together with the Big Bang and bouncing scenarios, are among the possible descriptions of the early Universe. This work aims at clarifying some general features of the primordial tensor power spectrum in this specific framework. In particular, some naive beliefs are corrected. Using a toy model, we investigate the cond...
Dark matter could be composed by black-hole remnants formed before the big-bang era in a bouncing cosmology. This hypothetical scenario has implications on the issue of the arrow of time: it upsets a common attribution of past low entropy to the state of the geometry and suggests a possible realisation of the perspectival interpretation of past low...
