A broad class of dark energy models, which have been proposed in attempts at solving the cosmological constant problems, predict a late time variation of the equation of state with redshift. The variation occurs as a scalar field picks up speed on its way to negative values of the potential. The negative potential energy eventually turns the expansion into contraction and the local universe und...

We investigate the effect of dark energy on the limits on the shear anisotropy in spatially homogeneous Bianchi cosmological models obtained from measurements of the temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. We shall primarily assume that the dark energy is modelled by a cosmological constant. In general, we find that there are tighter bounds on the shear than in models with ...

We study the complex visibilities of the cosmic microwave background anisotropies that are observables in interferometric observations of the cosmic microwave background, using the multipole expansion methods commonly adopted in analyzing single-dish experiments. This allows us to recover the properties of the visibilities that is obscured in the flat-sky approximation. Discussions of the windo...

We explore the possibility that the present stage of accelerated expansion of the universe is due to the presence of a cosmic vector field. We show that vector theories allow for the generation of an accelerated phase without the introduction of potential terms or unnatural scales in the Lagrangian. We propose a particular model with the same number of parameters as ΛCDM and excellent fits to S...

We investigate the effects of cosmological expansion on the spectrum of small-scale structure on a cosmic string. We simulate the evolution of a string with two modes that differ in wavelength by one order of magnitude. Once the short mode is inside the horizon, we find that its physical amplitude remains unchanged, in spite of the fact that its comoving wavelength decreases as the longer mode ...

Most of the energy in the Universe consists of some form of dark energy that is gravitationally self-repulsive and that is causing the expansion of the Universe to accelerate. The possible candidates are a vacuum energy density (or, equivalently, a cosmological constant) and quintessence, a time-evolving, spatially inhomogeneous component with negative pressure. In this review, we focus on quin...

A general formulation for describing odd-harmonic cosmic strings is developed and used to determine the self-intersection properties of highharmonic loops. This is important because loop formation mechanisms produce high-harmonic components (kinks) which can only be eliminated very slowly by gravitational radiation, damping by the dense surrounding plasma in the era of string formation, or by t...

Introducing an effective refraction index of an isotropic cosmic medium, we investigate the cosmological fluid dynamics which is consistent with a conformal, timelike symmetry of a corresponding “optical” metric. We demonstrate that this kind of symmetry is compatible with the existence of a negative viscous pressure and, consequently, with cosmological entropy production. We establish an exact...

Specific internal self-interactions in gaseous cosmic fluids are shown to give rise to effective negative pressures which may violate the strong energy condition. On this basis we discuss the transition from an initial de Sitter phase to a subsequent Friedmann-Lemâıtre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) period as a non-equilibrium configuration of an ultrarelativistic gas. An accelerated expansion of the ...

We consider how upcoming, prospective large-scale structure surveys, measuring galaxy weak lensing and position in tandem with the cosmic microwave background temperature anisotropies, constrain cosmic scale modifications to general relativity. In such theories, both the homogeneous expansion history and the growth of large-scale structure can have signatures of the modification. We consider an...