Related papers: Inflation after WMAP3
The model of Natural Inflation is examined in light of recent 3-year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and shown to provide a good fit. The inflaton potential is naturally flat due to shift symmetries, and in the simplest…
We show that in theories with a nontrivial kinetic term the contribution of the gravitational waves to the CMB fluctuations can be substantially larger than that is naively expected in simple inflationary models. This increase of the…
The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology, and - in conjuction with ideas from superstring theory - has led to speculations about an "inflationary multiverse". From a point of view of phenomenology, the…
Inflation elegantly provides initial conditions for the standard model of cosmology, while solving the horizon, flatness, and magnetic monopole problems. Inflationary models make predictions for the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and the…
Models of cosmic inflation posit an early phase of accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields in curved spacetime. Though detailed assumptions about fields and couplings vary across models,…
Motivated by the prospect of testing inflation from precision cosmic microwave background observations, we present analytic results for scalar and tensor perturbations in single-field inflation models based on the application of uniform…
In this paper we will highlight how a simple vacuum energy dominated inflection-point inflation can match the current data from cosmic microwave background radiation, and predict large primordial tensor to scalar ratio, $r \sim…
Power spectra play an important role in the theory of inflation, and their ability to reproduce current observational data to high accuracy is often considered a triumph of inflation, largely because of a lack of credible alternatives. In…
We consider the effects on the primordial power spectrum of a period of radiation-dominated expansion prior to the inflationary era. If inflation lasts a total of only 60 e-folds or so, the boundary condition for quantum modes cannot be…
We study an inflationary scenario with a vector impurity. We show that the universe undergoes anisotropic inflationary expansion due to a preferred direction determined by the vector. Using the slow-roll approximation, we find a formula to…
We consider a cosmological model in which the tensor mode becomes massive during inflation, and study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization bispectra arising from the mixing between the scalar mode and the…
Inflation is the currently accepted paradigm for the beginnings of the Universe. To explain the observed almost scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations with only a slight spectral tilt, inflation must have been "slow roll", that…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary…
Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…
The observational status of inflation after the Planck 2013 and 2015 results and the BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck joint analysis is discussed. These pedagogical lecture notes are intended to serve as a technical guide filling the gap…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
If observations confirm BICEP2's claim of a tensor-scalar ratio $r\approx 0.2$ on CMB scales, then the inflationary consistency relation $n_{t}=-r/8$ predicts a small negative value for the tensor spectral index $n_t$. We show that future…
We derive the implications for anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background following from a model of inflation in which a bare cosmological constant is gradually screened by an infrared process in quantum gravity. The model predicts…
Cosmic acceleration manifested in the early universe as inflation, generating primordial gravitational waves detectable in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Cosmic acceleration is occurring again at present as dark energy,…