Related papers: Punctuated inflation and the low CMB multipoles

We show that multi-field inflationary models with negligible turning in field space during inflation can lead to an effective sourcing of adiabatic from entropic perturbations {\it after} the end of inflation. We illustrate this general…

Fluctuations in the intensity and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe each contain clues about the nature of the earliest moments of time. The next generation of…

The recent measurements of temperature and polarization of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have improved our understanding of the Universe and are in remarkable agreement with the $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model. However, scale dependent…

We propose an inflationary primordial feature model that can explain both the large and small-scale anomalies in the currently measured cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy spectra, revealing a clip of adventurous history of the…

We explore the possibility that a multiple-stage inflationary scenario based on supersymmetric GUT models, can account for the break at $k_b \simeq 0.05 h/Mpc$ in the power spectrum of galaxy clustering, while it reproduces the angular…

We show that models of new particle physics containing massless pseudoscalar fields super-weakly coupled to photons can be very efficiently probed with CMB polarization anisotropies. The stochastic pseudoscalar fluctuations generated during…

We present constraints on canonical single-field inflation derived from WMAP five year, ACBAR, QUAD, BICEP data combined with the halo power spectrum from SDSS LRG7. Models with a non-scale-invariant spectrum and a red tilt n_s < 1 are now…

We investigate the impact of a hypothesized delayed initiation of inflation, characterized by a cutoff k_min to the primordial power spectrum in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This cutoff affects both the scalar and tensor spectra,…

We present the constraints on inflationary parameters in a flat $\Lambda$CDM universe obtained by WMAP three year data release, plus smaller scale CMB and two LSS data sets, 2dF and SDSS (treated separately). We use a Markov Chain Monte…

Boomerang, Maxima, DASI, CBI and VSA significantly increase the case for accelerated expansion in the early universe (the inflationary paradigm) and at the current epoch (dark energy dominance), especially when combined with data on high…

We study several anisotropic inflationary models and their implications for the observed violation of statistical isotropy in the CMBR data. In two of these models the anisotropy decays very quickly during the inflationary phase of…

We study the observational implications of a class of inflationary models wherein the inflaton is coupled to the Einstein tensor through a generalized non-minimal derivative coupling (GNMDC). In particular, we explore whether these models…

We propose that several of the anomalies that have been observed at large angular scales in the CMB have a common origin in a cosmic bounce that took place before the inflationary era. The bounce introduces a new physical scale in the…

Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…

We investigate the observational viability of a class of $\alpha$-attractors inflationary models in light of the most recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Large-Scale Structure (LSS) data. By considering a double-well potential we…

Non-Gaussianity in the inflationary perturbations can couple observable scales to modes of much longer wavelength (even superhorizon), leaving as a signature a large-angle modulation of the observed cosmic microwave background (CMB) power…

The recent Planck data on the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background marginally support deviations from the $\Lambda$CDM model at several multipoles. With a view towards current and forthcoming…

We revisit arguments that simple models of inflation with a small red tilt in the scalar power spectrum generically yield an observable tensor spectrum. We show that criteria for fine-tuning based upon the algebraic simplicity of the…

Thermal inflation, a brief low energy inflation after the primordial inflation, resolves the moduli problem in the context of supersymmetric cosmology. In the thermal inflation scenario, the primordial power spectrum is modestly redshifted…

There is solid theoretical and observational motivation behind the idea of scale-invariance as a fundamental symmetry of Nature. We consider a recently proposed classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and…