Related papers: Relic gravitons from super-inflation
We study the evolution of cosmological perturbations on large scales, up to second order, for a perfect fluid with generic equation of state. Taking advantage of super-horizon conservation laws, it is possible to follow the evolution of the…
Since the standard inflationary paradigm is based on quantum field theory on classical space-times, it excludes the Planck era. Using techniques from loop quantum gravity, the paradigm is extended to a self-consistent theory from the Planck…
In previous work we argued that the correct procedure to predict the gravitational wave signal from preheating after inflation rests on the in-in formalism. We extend here our previous analysis to include the backreaction of the produced…
In scale-invariant models of fundamental physics all mass scales are generated via spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this work, we study inflation in scale-invariant quadratic gravity, in which the Planck mass is generated classically by a…
String cosmology models predict a cosmic background of gravitational waves produced during a period of dilaton-driven inflation. I describe the background, present astrophysical and cosmological bounds on it, and discuss in some detail how…
If Higgs is a spectator scalar, i.e. if it is not directly coupled to the inflaton, superhorizon Higgs modes must have been exited during inflation. Since Higgs is unstable its decay into photons is expected to seed superhorizon photon…
We consider an inflationary model in the hidden-sector broken supergravity with an effectively large cutoff. The inflaton decay into right-handed neutrinos naturally causes the observed baryon asymmetry of the universe with a reheating…
Gravitational waves were copiously produced in the early Universe whenever the processes taking place were sufficiently violent. The spectra of several of these gravitational wave backgrounds on subhorizon scales have been extensively…
We analyze the spectrum of gravitational waves generated by the induced spectrum of tensor fluctuation during warm natural inflation. In our previous work it has been demonstrated that an epoch of warm natural inflation can lead to…
We discuss the evolution of gravitational waves in a brane-world cosmology embedded in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime. We show that during slow-roll inflation, modelled as a period of quasi-de Sitter expansion on the brane, there…
A scale-invariant universe can have a period of accelerated expansion at early times: inflation. We use a frame-invariant approach to calculate inflationary observables in a scale invariant theory of gravity involving two scalar fields -…
The inflationary reheating phase begins when accelerated expansion ends. As all Standard Model particles are coupled to gravity, gravitational interactions will lead to particle production. This includes the thermal bath, dark matter and…
The curvaton and the inhomogeneous reheating scenarios for the generation of the cosmological curvature perturbation on large scales represent an alternative to the standard slow-roll scenario where the observed density perturbations are…
We investigate a topological inflation model in supergravity. By means of numerical simulations, it is confirmed that topological inflation can take place in supergravity. We also show that the condition for successful inflation depends not…
We propose a mechanism to evade the Lyth bound in models of inflation. We minimally extend the conventional single-field inflation model in general relativity (GR) to a theory with non-vanishing graviton mass in the very early universe. The…
In a previous paper [1] we considered the possibility that (within the early-radiation epoch) there has been (also) a short period of a significant presence of cosmic strings. During this radiation-plus-strings stage the Universe…
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…
During or towards the end of inflation, the Standard Model (SM) Higgs forms a condensate with a large amplitude. Following inflation, the condensate oscillates, decaying non-perturbatively into the rest of the SM species. The resulting…
We compute the corrections to the primordial power spectrum that should arise in realistic inflationary scenarios if there exists a generic covariant ultraviolet (UV) cutoff, as commonly motivated by considerations of quantum gravity. The…
We consider the gravitational generation of the massive Z-boson field of the standard model, due to the natural breaking of its conformal invariance during inflation. The electroweak symmetry restoration at the end of inflation turns the…