Related papers: Boom and Bust Inflation: a Graceful Exit via Compa…
While moving down the potential on its classical slow roll trajectory, the inflaton field is subject to quantum jumps, which take it up or down the potential at random. In "stochastic inflation", the impact of these quantum jumps is modeled…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
Eternal inflation produces pocket universes with all physically allowed vacua and histories. Some of these pocket universes might contain a phase of slow-roll inflation, some might undergo cycles of cosmological evolution and some might…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
We propose a model for early universe cosmology without the need for fundamental scalar fields. Cosmic acceleration and phenomenologically viable reheating of the universe results from a series of energy transitions, where during each…
Two qualitatively different modes of ending superluminal expansion are possible in extended inflation. One mode, different from the one envoked in most extended models to date, easily avoids making big bubbles that distort the cosmic…
We show that a moduli space of the form predicted by string theory, lifted by supersymmetry breaking, gives rise to successful inflation for large regions of parameter space without any modification or fine tuning. This natural realization…
On the basis of a semi-classical analysis of vacuum energy in an expanding spacetime, we describe a non-singular cosmological model in which the vacuum density decays with time, with a concomitant production of matter. During an infinitely…
The generic embedding of the $R+R^2$ higher curvature theory into old-minimal supergravity leads to models with rich vacuum structure in addition to its well-known inflationary properties. When the model enjoys an exact R-symmetry, there is…
We present a new model of inflation in which the inflaton is the extra component of a gauge field in a 5d theory compactified on a circle. The chief merit of this model is that the potential comes only from non-local effects so that its…
Warm inflation has normalized two ideas in cosmology, that in the early universe the initial primordial density perturbations generally could be of classical rather than quantum origin and that during inflation, particle production from…
We investigate the possibility that the Universe may inflate due to moduli fields, corresponding to flat directions of supersymmetry, lifted by supergravity corrections. Using a hybrid-type potential we obtain a two-stage inflationary…
The stable version of the anomaly-induced inflation does not need a fine tuning and leads to sufficient expansion of the Universe. The non-stable version (Starobinsky model) provides the graceful exit to the FRW phase. We indicate the…
An outgrowth of the idea of inflation is advanced. In the inflation regime, the singularity condition is broken. Equations which govern inflation are invariant under time reversal, so that they describe deflation as well. Those two…
It is widely accepted that the primordial universe experienced a brief period of accelerated expansion called inflation. This scenario provides a plausible solution to the horizon and flatness problems. However, the particle physics…
If the recent detection of $B-$mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background by BICEP2 observations, withstand the test of time after the release of recent PLANCK dust polarisation data, then it would surprisingly put the…
We find a unique way of realizing inflation through cyclic phases in an universe with negative vacuum energy. According to the second law of thermodynamics entropy monotonically increases from cycle to cycle, typically by a constant factor.…
We revisit models of natural inflation and show that the single-field effective theory described by the potential $V(a)\sim \cos\frac{a}{f}$ breaks down as the inflaton $a$ makes large-field excursions, even for values of $f$ smaller than…
We embed the supersymmetric standard model of hybrid inflation based on the next-to-minimal superpotential term $\lambda NH_uH_d$ supplemented by an inflaton term $\kappa \phi N^2$, into an extra-dimensional framework, in which all the…