Related papers: The Phase Transition to Eternal Inflation
Present treatments of eternal inflation regulate infinities by imposing a geometric cutoff. We point out that some matter systems reach the cutoff in finite time. This implies a nonzero probability for a novel type of catastrophe. According…
Making observable predictions for cosmic inflation requires determining when the wavenumbers of astrophysical interest today exited the Hubble radius during the inflationary epoch. These instants are commonly evaluated using the slow-roll…
We study the energy distribution and equation of state of the universe between the end of inflation and the onset of radiation domination (RD), considering observationally consistent single-field inflationary scenarios, with a potential…
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…
We consider reheating in a class of asymptotically safe quantum field theories recently studied in \cite{Litim:2014uca, Litim:2015iea}. These theories allow for an inflationary phase in the very early universe. Inflation ends with a period…
In this paper, we show that eternal inflation of the random walk type is generically absent in the brane inflationary scenario. Depending on how the brane inflationary universe originated, eternal inflation of the false vacuum type is still…
Non-trivial inflaton self-interactions can yield calculable signatures of primordial non-Gaussianity that are measurable in cosmic surveys. Surprisingly, we find that the phase transition to slow-roll eternal inflation is often incalculable…
Our understanding of the state of the universe between the end of inflation and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is incomplete. The dynamics at the end of inflation are rich and a potential source of observational signatures. Reheating, the…
We show how the quantum-to-classical transition of the cosmological fluctuations produced during an inflationary stage can be described using the consistent histories approach. We identify the corresponding histories in the limit of…
I investigate whether eternal inflation is possible when the inflaton originally travels upslope the scalar potential and inevitably reaches a turn-around point where its classical kinetic energy momentarily vanishes. This behaviour occurs…
We provide a comprehensive numerical study of the Emergent Cyclic Inflation scenario. This is a scenario where instead of traditional monotonic slow roll inflation, the universe expands over numerous short asymmetric cycles due to the…
We develop a potential-independent cosmographic framework, in which cosmographic parameters are promoted to dynamical variables within a closed autonomous system. Although the cosmographic hierarchy is formally infinite, we achieve closure…
We compute the distribution of sizes of inflating and non-inflating regions in an eternally inflating Universe. As a first illustrative problem, we study a simple scenario of an eternally inflating Universe in the presence of a massless…
In this article, I mainly discuss the dynamics of the pre-inflationary Universe for the potential $V(\phi) \propto \phi^n$ with $n=5/3$ in the context of loop quantum cosmology, in which the big bang singularity is resolved by a…
Warm inflation is an interesting possibility of describing the early universe, whose basic feature is the absence, at least in principle, of a preheating or reheating phase. Here we analyze the dynamics of warm inflation generalizing 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…
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)…
We summarize our work on a consistency condition for inflation in two-field cosmological models, in the regime of rapid turn and third-order slow roll. To ensure a sustained inflationary period of this type, one needs to satisfy a certain…
One of the fundamental problems of modern cosmology is to explain the origin of all the matter and radiation in the Universe today. The inflationary model predicts that the oscillations of the scalar field at the end of inflation will…
Departing from standard slow-roll conditions is one way of putting the inflationary paradigm to test, and constraining the dynamics of the inflaton field with a constant-rate of roll of the inflaton field, a.k.a. the constant-roll scenario,…