Related papers: Constraints on Brane Inflation and Cosmic Strings

We provide a pedagogical overview of inflation in string theory. Our theme is the sensitivity of inflation to Planck-scale physics, which we argue provides both the primary motivation and the central theoretical challenge for the subject.…

The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…

We review the currrent cosmic parameter determinations of relevance to inflation using the WMAP-1year, Boomerang, CBI, Acbar and other CMB data. The basic steps in the pipelines which determine the bandpowers from the raw data from which…

We study how the next generation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurement missions (such as EPIC, LiteBIRD, PRISM and COrE) will be able to constrain the inflationary landscape in the hardest to disambiguate situation in which…

We compare the Infrared Dirac-Born-Infeld (IR DBI) brane inflation model to observations using a Bayesian analysis. The current data cannot distinguish it from the \LambdaCDM model, but is able to give interesting constraints on various…

I describe a dynamical mechanism for solving the fine-tuning problem of brane-antibrane inflation. By inflating with stacks of branes and antibranes, the branes can naturally be trapped at a metastable minimum of the potential. As branes…

We revisit the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints on the spatial curvature of the Universe, assessing how they change when the curvature parameter and the primordial inflationary scalar spectrum are treated consistently within…

We analyse the signatures of brane inflation models with moduli stabilisation. These are hybrid inflation models with a non-trivial field-space metric which can induce complex trajectories for the fields during inflation. This in turn could…

Cosmic strings generate vector and tensor modes in the B-channel of polarization, as well as the usual temperature power spectrum and E-mode polarization spectrum. We use the power spectrum obtained from high-resolution Nambu-Goto cosmic…

If they exist, networks of superconducting cosmic strings are capable of injecting copious amounts of electromagnetic energy into the background over a broad range of frequencies. We study this injection both analytically, as well as…

Accurate estimation of cosmological parameters from microwave background anisotropies requires high-accuracy understanding of the cosmological model. Normally, a power-law spectrum of density perturbations is assumed, in which case the…

We present constraints on the extended Starobinsky and Weyl gravity model of inflation using updated available observational data. The data includes cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from Planck and BICEP/Keck 2018…

With future galaxy surveys, a huge number of Fourier modes of the distribution of the large scale structures in the Universe will become available. These modes are complementary to those of the CMB and can be used to set constraints on…

The lack of power on large scales (l < 40) might have been observed by the PLANCK satellite. We argue that this putative feature can be explained by a phase of fast roll at the onset of inflation. We show that in the context of single field…

Current measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropy power spectra of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) seem to indicate that the naive expectation for the slow-roll hierarchy within the most simple inflationary paradigm…

Cosmic strings formed during inflation are expected to be either diluted over super-Hubble distances, i.e., invisible today, or to have crossed our past light cone very recently. We discuss the latter situation in which a few strings…

We revisit D-term inflation with the bounds of the cosmic string tension from gravitational wave observations and consider the possible deviation of the spectral index compared with the $\Lambda$CDM model in light of prerecombination…

The most important criteria for a successful inflation are to explain the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the Standard Model quarks and…

Considering the inflation model based on a $f(R)$ gravity theory, we obtain several important constraints from the large angular scale CMBR observations. First, the ordinary slow-roll assumption during the inflation together with…

Using a principal component (PC) basis that accommodates order unity features in the slow roll parameters as fine as 1/10 of a decade across more than 2 decades of the inflationary expansion, we test slow roll and single field inflation…