Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - The quantum origin of cosmic structure
T2 - theory and observations
AU - Dimopoulos, Konstantinos
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the inflationary paradigm, a number of mechanisms (e.g. curvaton, inhomogeneous reheating etc.) through which such perturbations can source the curvature perturbation in the Universe and explain the formation of structures such as galaxies are briefly described. Finally, the possibility that cosmic vector fields also contribute to the curvature perturbation (e.g. through the vector curvaton mechanism) is considered and its distinct observational signatures are discussed, such as correlated statistical anisotropy in the spectrum and bispectrum of the curvature perturbation.
AB - The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the inflationary paradigm, a number of mechanisms (e.g. curvaton, inhomogeneous reheating etc.) through which such perturbations can source the curvature perturbation in the Universe and explain the formation of structures such as galaxies are briefly described. Finally, the possibility that cosmic vector fields also contribute to the curvature perturbation (e.g. through the vector curvaton mechanism) is considered and its distinct observational signatures are discussed, such as correlated statistical anisotropy in the spectrum and bispectrum of the curvature perturbation.
U2 - 10.1088/1742-6596/283/1/012010
DO - 10.1088/1742-6596/283/1/012010
M3 - Journal article
VL - 283
JO - Journal of Physics: Conference Series
JF - Journal of Physics: Conference Series
SN - 1742-6588
IS - 1
M1 - 012010
ER -