Together with his thesis advisor, Albrecht developed New Inflation, solving the bubble collision problem of Alan Guth's original model of inflation. Later, Albrecht studied the observable effects of cosmic topological defects, contributing to ruling out cosmic strings as the dominant mechanism for structure formation.
Along with João Magueijo, Albrecht independently proposed a model of varying speed of light cosmology which posits that the speed of light in the early universe was a trillion times faster in order to explain the horizon problem of cosmology.
In the 21st century, Albrecht worked on quantum mechanics, as well as probability and quantum theory.