Conference

At large scales the CMB spectrum measured by WMAP appears to have an anomalously low power of the quadrupole and an asymmetry of power at l < 40. We show that with an initial stage of fast roll of the inflation and a gradient in the initial conditions a simple chaotic inflation model may be capable of explaining both anomalies.

I consider a six dimensional space-time, in which two of the dimensions are compactified by a flux. Matter can be localized on a codimension one brane coupled to the bulk gauge field and wrapped around an axis of symmetry of the internal space. By studying the linear perturbations around this background, I show that the gravitational interaction between sources on the brane is described by Einstein 4d gravity at large distances. This is one of the first complete study of gravity in a realistic brane model with two extra dimensions, in which the mechanism of stabilization of the extra space is fully taken into account.

I discuss two instances in which nonlinear perturbations in cosmological models are important. First, in de Sitter space-time, the bare necessity that the perturbations should be part of a consistent Taylor expansion of the field equations leads to the requirement, using the 'linearization stability' arguments of the '70's, that the quantum field theory of a scalar field on de Sitter space-time is manifestly de Sitter invariant (not covariant). Second, the concern that in slow-roll inflation the effect of second order perturbations on the long wavelength (super Hubble) perturbations could be much stronger than that of the first order perturbations, for a wide range of slow-roll conditions, is explored in the context of a linear inflation potential and chaotic inflation.