Related papers: Reheating Closed String Inflation
Reheating in string compactifications is generically driven by the decay of the lightest modulus which produces Standard Model particles, dark matter and light hidden sector degrees of freedom that behave as dark radiation. This common…
Successful inflationary models should (i) describe the data well; (ii) arise generically from sensible UV completions; (iii) be insensitive to detailed fine-tunings of parameters and (iv) make interesting new predictions. We argue that a…
We explore the possibility of obtaining inflation in weakly coupled heterotic string theory, where the model dependent axions are responsible for driving inflation. This model can be considered as a certain extrapolation of…
We study models in which reheating happens only through non-perturbative processes. The energy transferred can be exponentially suppressed unless the inflaton is coupled to a particle with a parametrically small mass. Additionally, in some…
We review recent progress in string model building in both early and late time cosmology. We describe the main theoretical and phenomenological features of an entire class of inflationary models where inflation is driven by a type IIB…
Motivated by Refs \cite{am1,am2}, we analyze how the inflaton decay reheats the Universe within supersymmetry. In a non-supersymmetric case the inflaton usually decays via preheating unless its couplings to other fields are very small.…
Inflationary models whose vacuum energy arises from a D-term are believed not to suffer from the supergravity eta problem of F-term inflation. That is, D-term models have the desirable property that the inflaton mass can naturally remain…
We investigate the feasibility of models of inflation with a large Gauss-Bonnet coupling at late times, which have been shown to modify and prevent the end of inflation. Despite the potential of Gauss-Bonnet models in predicting favourable…
The problems of attempting inflationary model-building in a theory containing a dilaton are explained. In particular, I study the shape of the dilaton potential today and during inflation, based on a weakly-coupled heterotic string model…
We investigate in some quantitative details the viability of reheating in multi-throat brane inflationary scenarios by estimating and comparing the time scales for the various processes involved. We also calculate within perturbative string…
We consider inflationary cosmology in the context of string compactifications with multiple throats. In scenarios where the warping differs significantly between throats, string and Kaluza-Klein physics can generate potentially observable…
The end of inflation is connected to the standard cosmological scenario through reheating. During reheating, the inflaton oscillates around the minimum of the potential and thus decays into the daughter particles that populate the Universe…
An attractive candidate for the inflaton is an axion slowly rolling down a flat potential protected by a perturbative shift symmetry. Realisations of this idea within large field, natural and monomial inflation have been disfavoured by…
If cosmic inflation was driven by an electrically neutral scalar field stable on cosmological time scales, the field necessarily constitutes all or part of dark matter (DM). We study this possibility in a scenario where the inflaton field…
Tachyon inflation is one of the most attractive models of noncannonical inflation motivated by string theory. In this work we revisit the constraints on tachyon inflation with inverse $\cosh$ potential and exponential potential considering…
Models of supersymmetric D-term inflation require a new mass scale near 10^{15-16} GeV in order to match the density perturbation spectrum observed by COBE. Attempts to obtain such a scale from the anomalous U(1) of string theories fail in…
Reheating is a transition era after the end of inflation, during which the inflaton is converted into the particles that populate the Universe at later times. No direct cosmological observables are normally traceable to this period of…
Reheating connects the inflationary universe to the radiation-dominated evolution of standard Big Bang cosmology. Due to the lack of direct observations, we rely on indirect bounds on this phase from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)…
These lectures cover the theoretical structure and phenomenology of some basic mechanisms for inflation. A full treatment of the problem requires `ultraviolet completion' because of the sensitivity of inflation to quantum gravity effects,…
We study the perspectives to extract information about the microphysical parameters that governed the reheating process after cosmic inflation from CMB data. We identify conditions under which the inflaton coupling to other fields can be…