Related papers: Axion Cosmology and the Energy Scale of Inflation
In construction of an inflationary model, one usually assumes that the matter sector of the gravitational action is minimally coupled to the background. It means that the matter (inflaton) part of the action is coupled with the same metric…
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
The very basics of cosmological inflation are discussed. We derive the equations of motion for the inflaton field, introduce the slow-roll parameters, and present the computation of the inflationary perturbations and their connection to the…
The radial direction of the Peccei--Quinn field can drive cosmic inflation, given a non-minimal coupling to gravity. This scenario has been considered to simultaneously explain inflation, the strong $CP$ problem, and dark matter. We argue…
The theory of cosmological fluctuations assumes that the pre-inflationary state of the universe was the quantum vacuum of a scalar field(s) coupled to gravity. The observed cosmic microwave background fluctuations are then interpreted as…
Models of inflation in a gravitational background with an anisotropic space-time scaling are studied. The background is a higher-dimensional Lifshitz throat with the anisotropy scaling $z\neq 1$. After the dimensional reduction, the…
We calculate the spectrum of large angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies due to quantum fluctuations of the gravitational wave modes in one-bubble open inflation models. We find the bubble-wall fluctuation modes, which had…
The new three year WMAP data seem to confirm the presence of non-standard large scale features in the Cosmic Microwave Anisotropies power spectrum. While these features may hint at uncorrected experimental systematics, it is also possible…
Isocurvature perturbations in the inflationary literature typically involve quantum fluctuations of bosonic field degrees of freedom. In this work, we consider isocurvature perturbations from fermionic quantum fluctuations during inflation.…
Measurements of CMB temperature fluctuations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) indicate that the fluctuation amplitude in one half of the sky differs from the amplitude in the other half. We show that such an asymmetry…
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…
We investigate if the observed small and nearly scale-invariant primordial cosmic perturbation, i.e. the perturbation amplitude $P_\zeta\sim10^{-9}$ and the spectral index $n_s \simeq 0.965$, is typical in the landscape of vacua after…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
The clockwork axion refers to a family of aligned multi-axion models that lead to an exponential hierarchy between the scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking and the scale of the axion decay constant. The clockworking can bring the…
In order to accommodate the QCD axion as the dark matter (DM) in a model in which the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry is broken before the end of inflation, a relatively low scale of inflation has to be invoked in order to avoid bounds from DM…
BICEP2 measurement of primordial tensor modes in CMB suggests that cosmological inflation is due to a slowly rolling inflaton taking trans-Planckian values and provides further experimental evidence for the absence of large $M_{\rm P}$…
Informed by a quantum information perspective, we interpret cosmological expansion of space as growing entanglement between underlying degrees of freedom. In particular, we focus on inflationary cosmology, which, while being a successful…
Cosmological inflation is studied in the case where the inflaton is the overall modulus $T$ for an orbifold. General forms of the (non-perturbative) superpotential are considered to ensure that $G=K+{\rm ln}|W|^2$ is modular invariant. We…
We investigate how various inflationary and bouncing cosmologies can be realized by imperfect fluids with a generalized equation of state, in the context of both classical and loop quantum cosmology. With regards to the inflationary…
In a variety of inflation models the motion of the inflaton may trigger the production of some non-inflaton particles during inflation, for example via parametric resonance or a phase transition. Particle production during inflation leads…