Related papers: Cosmological constraints on general, single field …

Within the class of inflationary models, k-inflation represents the most general single field framework that can be associated with an effective quadratic action for the curvature perturbations and a varying speed of sound. The incoming…

Inflation in cosmology is a specific stage preceding the Big Bang, aimed at solving both old background problems and new perturbation issues. Single-field inflation is a candidate to illustrate the picture of the initial universe, and…

Currently, a method has been developed for the cosmological inflation model with a single scalar field to calculate cosmological parameters such as the power spectrum of scalar and tensor perturbations, their spectral indices, and the…

Single field inflationary models with a non-minimal kinetic term (also called k-inflationary models) can be characterised by the so-called sound flow functions, which complete the usual Hubble flow hierarchy. These parameters appear in the…

Inflationary models within string theory exhibit unusual scalar field dynamics involving non-minimal kinetic terms and generically referred to as k-inflation. In this situation, the standard slow-roll approach used to determine the behavior…

The advent of explicit Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) inflationary models within string theory has drawn renewed interest to the cosmological role of unusual scalar field dynamics, usually referred to as k-inflation. In this situation, the…

In the hope of avoiding model dependence of the cosmological observables, phenomenological parametrizations of Cosmic Inflation have recently been proposed. Typically, they are expressed in terms of two parameters associated with an…

The main aim of this paper is to provide a qualitative introduction to the cosmic inflation and its relationship with current cosmological observations. The inflationary model solves many of the fundamental problems that challenge the…

In this paper, inflationary cosmology is reviewed, paying particular attention to its observational signatures associated with large-scale density perturbations generated from quantum fluctuations. In the most general scalar-tensor theories…

We update constraints on the Hubble function H(phi) during inflation, using the most recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large scale structure (LSS) data. Our main focus is on a comparison between various commonly used methods of…

This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…

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…

Cosmic inflation, which describes an accelerated expansion of the early Universe, yields the most successful predictions regarding temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Nevertheless, the precise origin of the…

The observational constraints on the primordial power spectrum have tightened considerably with the release of the first year analysis of the WMAP observations, especially when combined with the results from other CMB experiments and galaxy…

We extend an alternative, phenomenological approach to inflation by means of an equation of state and a sound speed, both of them functions of the number of $e$-folds and four phenomenological parameters. This approach captures a number of…

Detailed analyses of the WMAP data indicate possible oscillatory features in the primordial curvature perturbation, which moreover appears to be suppressed beyond the present Hubble radius. Such deviations from the usual inflationary…

We study the modifications induced on scalar field inflation produced by considering a general modification of the Heisenberg algebra. We proceed by modifying the Poisson brackets on the classical theory whenever the corresponding quantum…

Motivated by the prospect of testing inflation from precision cosmic microwave background observations, we present analytic results for scalar and tensor perturbations in single-field inflation models based on the application of uniform…

We assay how inflationary models whose properties are dominated by the dynamics of a single scalar field are constrained by cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). We classify…

We study the implications of the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for early universe cosmology and in particular inflationary cosmology. The TCC leads to the conclusion that if we want inflationary cosmology to…