Perturbations and Quantum Relaxation

Quantum Feynman-Kac perturbations

Inflation, quantum fluctuations and cosmological perturbations

These lectures are intended to give a pedagogical introduction to the main current picture of the very early universe. After elementary reviews of general relativity and of the standard Big Bang model, the following subjects are discussed: inflation, the classical relativistic theory of cosmological perturbations and the generation of perturbations from scalar field quantum fluctuations during ...

Perturbations in the relaxation mechanism for a large cosmological constant

Recently, a mechanism for relaxing a large cosmological constant (CC) has been proposed [1], which transforms any initial vacuum energy density of arbitrary sign and magnitude into a harmless quantity without fine-tuning. The setup is implemented in the ΛXCDM framework, and it yields a reasonable cosmological background evolution similar to the ΛCDM model with a fine-tuned CC. In this work we a...

A quantum-mechanical relaxation model

Quantum radiation from superluminal refractive-index perturbations.

We analyze in detail photon production induced by a superluminal refractive-index perturbation in realistic experimental operating conditions. The interaction between the refractive-index perturbation and the quantum vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field leads to the production of photon pairs.