Related papers: Intermediate inflation or late time acceleration?
We study the behavior of large-scale (cosmological) modes of back-reaction effects during inflation. We find that the group of modes which describes the very large-scale fluctuations of energy density during inflation due to back-reaction…
A model of cosmological inflation is proposed in which field space is a hyperbolic plane. The inflaton never slow-rolls, and instead orbits the bottom of the potential, buoyed by a centrifugal force. Though initial velocities redshift away…
We present a novel background-independent framework for cosmic inflation, starting with a matrix model. In this framework, inflation is portrayed as a dynamic process responsible for the generation of both space and time. This stands in…
I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
We show that current cosmic acceleration can be explained by an almost massless scalar field experiencing quantum fluctuations during primordial inflation. Provided its mass does not exceed the Hubble parameter today, this field has been…
A theory of exponential modified gravity which explains both early-time inflation and late-time acceleration, in a unified way, is proposed. The theory successfully passes the local tests and fulfills the cosmological bounds and,…
Recently, attempts have been made to understand the apparent near coincidence of the present dark energy and matter energy in terms of a dynamical attractor-like solution for the evolution of a scalar field. In these models the field…
Inflation models can have an early phase of inflation where the evolution of the inflaton is driven by quantum fluctuations before entering the phase driven by the slope of the scalar field potential. For a Coleman-Weinberg potential this…
We present a model with a complex and a real scalar fields and a potential whose symmetry is explicitly broken by Planck-scale physics. For exponentially small breaking, the model accounts for the period of inflation in the early universe…
In simple inflationary cosmological scenarios the near-exponential growth can be followed by a long period in which the Universe is dominated by the oscillating inflaton condensate. The condensate is initially almost homogeneous, but…
A period of rapidly accelerating expansion is expected in the early Universe implemented by a scalar field slowly rolling down along an asymptotically flat potential preferred by the current data. In this paper, we point out that this…
In the standard picture, the inflationary universe is in a supercooled state which ends with a short time, large scale reheating period, after which the universe goes into a radiation dominated stage. An alternative is proposed here in…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
Currently there is no definitive description for the accelerated expansion of the Universe at both early and late times; we know these two periods as the epochs of inflation and dark energy. Contained within this Thesis are two studies of…
A viable model for inflation driven by a torsion function in a Friedmann background is presented. The scalar spectral index in the interval $0.92\lesssim n_{s}\lesssim 0.97$ is obtained in order to satisfy the initial conditions for…
We analyze the dynamics of models of warm inflation with general dissipative effects. We consider phenomenological terms both for the inflaton decay rate and for viscous effects within matter. We provide a classification of the asymptotic…
We compute the spectrum of cosmological perturbations in a scenario in which inflation is driven by radiation in a non-commutative space-time. In this scenario, the non-commutativity of space and time leads to a modified dispersion relation…