Talks

I will argue that in the context of string theory, the Big Bang singularity of standard and inflationary cosmology is automatically resolved. To see this at the level of an effective field theory, ideas from "Double Field Theory" are useful.

In this talk I will discuss several recent advances in loop quantum cosmology and its extension to inhomogeneous models. I will focus on spherically symmetric spacetimes and Gowdy cosmologies with local rotational symmetry in vacuum. I will discuss how to implement a quantum Hamiltonian evolution on these quantizations. Then, I will focus on how we can extract predictions from those quantum geometries, and finally analyze a concrete example: cosmological perturbations on Bianchi I spacetimes in LQC.

The power spectrum for fluctuations in the number density of galaxies can be very different in shape from the power spectrum for fluctuations in the mass density at very small wave vectors (i.e., large length scales) if the primordial density fluctuations are non-Gaussian. I review this phenomena. (It  is fairly well known in the more astrophysical part of the cosmology community but less so in the particle physics part of the field.) Then I show that primordial non-Gaussianities that arise from quantum loop diagrams in de-Sitter space can give rise to this phenomena. I also discuss if it is observable given constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity that arise from the Cosmic Microwave Background

When a particle is accelerated, as in a scattering event, it will radiate gravitons and, if electrically charged, photons. The infrared tail of the spectrum of this radiation has a divergence: an arbitrarily small amount of total energy is divided into an arbitrarily large number of radiated bosons. Each of these in turn carries a momentum and a helicity degree of freedom, and thus this radiation carries significant amounts of quantum information. I will demonstrate that the infrared bosonic radiation causes nearly complete decoherence of the final state of the hard particles into the momentum basis. When applied to radiation coming from the incoming state, it appears that the entire dynamical history of the process will be distinguishable by the radiation, thus causing a loss of any interference effects between branches of an incoming momentum superposition, such as in a wavepacket. I will explain how infrared dressed states, in the framework of Fadeev and Kulish, evade this issue. Finally, I'll conclude with some remarks on the potential relevance of these issues to black hole information loss