Related papers: Small cosmological signatures from multi-brane mod…
The standard model of cosmology with nearly Gaussian, isotropic, scale invariant and adiabatic initial conditions describes the cosmological observations well. However, the study of any deviation from the mentioned conditions will open up a…
We propose a "feature-scattering" mechanism to explain the cosmic microwave background cold spot seen from WMAP and Planck maps. If there are hidden features in the potential of multi-field inflation, the inflationary trajectory can be…
I describe a dynamical mechanism for solving the fine-tuning problem of brane-antibrane inflation. By inflating with stacks of branes and antibranes, the branes can naturally be trapped at a metastable minimum of the potential. As branes…
It is tempting to inflate along one of the many flat directions that arise in supersymmetric theories. The required flatness of the potential to obtain sufficient inflation and to not overproduce density fluctuations occurs naturally.…
We provide an analytical study of the coupling of short and long wavelength fluctuation modes during the initial phase of reheating in two field models like hybrid inflation. In these models, there is - at linear order in perturbation…
Gauss--Bonnet inflation typically affects the dynamics over an extended portion of the trajectory, making it difficult to isolate a controlled imprint at CMB scales. We consider a trajectory-selective coupling \(\mu(\phi,X)\) that gates the…
Higher-dimensional theories imply that some constants, such as the gravitational constant and the strength of the gauge-couplings, are not fundamental constants. Instead they are related to the sizes of the extra--dimensional space, which…
Supersymmetric compactification with moderately large radius (${\rm Re}< T > \sim {\cal O}(10)$ or more) not only accommodates supersymmetric unification, but also provides candidates for an inflaton in the form of geometric moduli; the…
The temperature at the end of reheating and the length of this cosmological phase can be bound to the inflationary observables if one considers the cosmological evolution from the time of Hubble crossing until today. There are many examples…
We propose a simple but effective mechanism to realize an inflationary early universe consistent with the observed WMAP, Planck and/or BICEP2 data, which would be incorporated in various supersymmetric models of elementary particles…
In this article we will overview several aspects of the string landscape, namely intersecting D-brane models and their statistics, possible model independent LHC signatures of intersecting brane models, flux compactification, moduli…
The first year of observations by the Planck satellite mission shows that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations are consistent with gaussian statistics in the primordial perturbations, a key prediction of the simplest models of…
We analyze the interplay between K\"ahler moduli stabilization and chaotic inflation in supergravity. While heavy moduli decouple from inflation in the supersymmetric limit, supersymmetry breaking generically introduces non-decoupling…
Moduli fields, which parameterize perturbative flat directions of the potential in supersymmetric theories, are natural candidates to act as inflatons. An inflationary potential on moduli space can result if the scale of dynamical SUSY…
Inflation universally produces classical almost scale free Gaussian inhomogeneities of any light scalars. Assuming the coupling constants at the time of inflation depend on some light moduli fields, we encounter the generation of modulated…
We investigate the observational signatures of three models of the early Universe in the $B$-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. In addition to the standard single field inflationary model, we also consider…
At energies higher than the brane tension, the dynamics of a scalar field rolling down a potential are modified relative to the predictions of General Relativity. The modifications imply, among other things, that steeper potentials can be…
Equipped with concrete examples of Type IIB orientifolds featuring poly-instanton corrections to the superpotential, the effects on moduli stabilization and inflationary cosmology are analyzed. Working in the framework of the LARGE volume…
In this work, we investigate the physical aspects of the inflection-point inflation scenario and assess its observational viability in light of current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. The model we consider encapsulates the inflaton…
We investigate moduli field dynamics in supergravity/M-theory like set ups where we turn on fluxes along some or all of the extra dimensions. As has been argued in the context of string theory, we observe that the fluxes tend to stabilize…