Related papers: Enhanced Non-Gaussianity from Excited Initial Stat…
A setting constituted by $\mathbb{N}$ 3-form fields, without any direct interaction between them, minimally coupled to gravity, is introduced in this paper as a framework to study the early evolution of the universe. We focus particularly…
Single field inflationary models predict nearly Gaussian initial conditions and hence a detection of non-Gaussianity would be a signature of the more complex inflationary scenarios. In this paper we study the effect on the cosmic microwave…
We investigate the possible effect of cosmological-constant type dark energy during the inflation period of the early universe. This is accommodated by a new dispersion relation in de Sitter space. The modified inflation model of a…
By engineering the electromagnetic vacuum field, the induced Casimir-Polder shift (also known as Lamb shift) and spontaneous emission rates of individual atomic levels can be controlled. When the strength of these effects becomes comparable…
The effective field theory (EFT) of inflation provides a natural framework to study the new physical effects on primordial perturbations. Recently a healthy extension of the EFT of inflation with high-order operators has been proposed,…
The inflationary cosmology paradigm is very successful in explaining the CMB anisotropy to the percent level. Besides the dependence on the inflationary model, the power spectra, spectral tilt and non-Gaussianity of the CMB temperature…
We study the phase space of initial conditions for brane inflation, and find that including the effects of the Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) kinetic term dramatically improves previous estimates on the amount of fine tuning of initial conditions…
One class of single-field inflationary models compatible with the recently-conjectured Swampland criteria would be those in which a Hubble slow-roll parameter $\epsilon_\text{H}$ is not the same as $\epsilon_\text{V} \sim (V'/V)^2$.…
The leading candidate for the very early universe is described by a period of rapid expansion known as inflation. While the standard paradigm invokes a single slow-rolling field, many different models may be constructed which fit the…
We generalize former findings regarding quantum-gravitational corrections arising from a canonical quantization of a perturbed FLRW universe during inflation by considering an initial state for the scalar and tensor perturbations that…
We study the effects of the non-attractor initial conditions for the canonical single-field inflation. The non-attractor stage can last only several $e$-folding numbers, and should be followed by hilltop inflation. This two-stage evolution…
We study the hybrid inflationary potential in a regime where the defect field is light, and more than 60 e-folds of accelerated expansion occur after the symmetry breaking transition. Using analytic and numerical techniques, we then…
Tensor non-Gaussianity represents an important future probe of the physics of inflation. Inspired by recent works, we elaborate further on the possibility of significant primordial tensor non-Gaussianities sourced by extra fields during…
We develop methods to calculate the curvature power spectrum in models where features in the inflaton potential nonlinearly excite modes and generate high frequency features in the spectrum. The first nontrivial effect of excitations…
We present a general framework where the effective field theory of single field inflation is extended by the inclusion of operators with mass dimension 3 and 4 in the unitary gauge. These higher dimensional operators introduce quartic and…
We analyze the signatures of inflationary models that are coupled to strongly interacting field theories, a basic class of multifield models also motivated by their role in providing dynamically small scales. Near the squeezed limit of the…
Scalar fields provide attractive modifications of pre-BBN cosmology, which have interesting implications for dark matter abundances. We analyse the effect of these modifications on the number of e-foldings between horizon exit of CMB modes…
If the initial quantum state of the primordial perturbations broke rotational invariance, that would be seen as a statistical anisotropy in the angular correlations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) temperature…
We investigate the possible influence of very-high-energy physics on inflationary predictions focussing on whether effective field theories can allow effects which are parametrically larger than order H^2/M^2, where M is the scale of heavy…
We describe models of single-field inflation with small and sharp step features in the potential (and sound speed) of the inflaton field, in the context of the Effective Field Theory of Inflation. This approach allows us to study the…