Related papers: Gravitational inflaton decay and the hierarchy pro…
We consider the role of supersymmetric flat directions in reheating the Universe after inflation. One or more flat directions can develop large vevs during inflation, which can potentially affect reheating by slowing down scattering…
We consider the conditions for the decay products of perturbative inflaton decay to thermalize. The importance of considering the full spectrum of inflaton decay products in the thermalization process is emphasized. It is shown that the…
We propose a new class of inflationary solutions to the standard cosmological problems (horizon, flatness, monopole,...), based on a modification of old inflation. These models do not require a potential which satisfies the normal…
We investigate the production of gravitinos in a cosmological background. Gravitinos can be produced during preheating after inflation due to a combined effect of interactions with an oscillating inflaton field and absence of conformal…
Particles in a yet unexplored dark sector with sufficiently large mass and small gauge coupling may form purely gravitational atoms (quantum gravitational bound states) with a rich phenomenology. In particular, we investigate the…
Compactifying M-theory on a manifold of $G_2$ holonomy gives a UV complete 4D theory. It is supersymmetric, with soft supersymmetry breaking via gaugino condensation that simultaneously stabilizes all moduli and generates a hierarchy…
We apply the criterion of finite naturalness to the limiting case of a generic heavy sector decoupled from the Standard Model. The sole and unavoidable exception to this decoupling arises from gravitational interactions. We demonstrate that…
The aim of this paper is to determine an exact definition of the reheat temperature for a generic perturbative decay of the inflaton. In order to estimate the reheat temperature, there are two important conditions one needs to satisfy: (a)…
We present a gauge-invariant formalism to study the evolution of the curvature and entropy perturbations in the case in which spatial and time variations of the inflaton decay rate into ordinary matter are present. During the reheating…
We show that the recently proposed multi-natural inflation can be realized within the framework of 4D ${\cal N}=1$ supergravity. The inflaton potential mainly consists of two sinusoidal potentials that are comparable in size, but have…
At the end of inflation, dynamical instability can rapidly deposit the energy of homogeneous cold inflaton into excitations of other fields. This process, known as preheating, is rather violent, inhomogeneous and non-linear, and has to be…
We propose a retrofitted gravity mediation model which alleviates the gravitino overproduction from decays of an inflaton and a supersymmetry breaking field. In the model, we introduce an approximate U(1) symmetry under which the…
We present a new solution to the electroweak hierarchy problem. We introduce $N$ copies of the Standard Model with varying values of the Higgs mass parameter. This generically yields a sector whose weak scale is parametrically removed from…
We propose a 3 + 1 dimensional model of gravity which results in inflation at early times, followed by radiation- and matter-dominated epochs and a subsequent acceleration at late times. Both the inflation and late time acceleration are…
We study a model of quintessential inflation in the context of Palatini gravity. As a representative example, we consider the Peebles-Vilenkin model of quintessential inflation with a small non-minimal coupling to gravity, which is…
F-term hybrid inflation models in the context of supergravity generically have corrections to the inflaton mass squared of the order of H^{2} (the \eta-problem). In addition they have a problem with large deviations of the spectrum of…
We present a two-field inflation model where inflaton field has a non-canonical kinetic term due to the presence of a dilaton field. It is a two-parameter generalization of one-parameter Brans-Dicke gravity in the Einstein frame. We show…
The detection of primordial gravitational waves would offer a direct evidence of inflation and valuable insights into the dynamics of the early universe. During post-inflation reheating period, when the inflaton coherently oscillates at the…
We investigate the relaxation and decay of a particle during inflation by implementing the dynamical renormalization group. This investigation allows us to give a meaningful definition for the decay rate in an expanding universe. As a…
We derive an uncertainty relation for the energy density and pressure of a quantum scalar field in a time-dependent, homogeneous and isotropic, classical background, which implies the existence of large fluctuations comparable to their…