Thermal Perturbations from Cosmological Constant Relaxation

Understand

We probe the cosmological consequences of a recently proposed class of solutions to the cosmological constant problem.

• In these models, the universe undergoes a long period of inflation followed by a contraction and a bounce that sets the stage for the hot big bang era.
• A requirement of any successful early universe model is that it must reproduce the observed scale-invariant density perturbations at CMB scales.
• While these class of models involve a long period of inflation, the inflationary Hubble scale during their observationally relevant stages is at or below the current Hubble scale, rendering the de Sitter fluctuations too weak to seed the CMB anisotropies.