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We review the currrent cosmic parameter determinations of relevance to inflation using the WMAP-1year, Boomerang, CBI, Acbar and other CMB data. The basic steps in the pipelines which determine the bandpowers from the raw data from which…
I discuss how parameters describing inflation in the very early universe may be related to primordial perturbation spectra. Precision observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) such as those provided by the WMAP…
The initial power spectrum of density perturbations, generated during the inflationary epoch, is now constrained by observations on scales $\lambda>5$~Mpc and has a power-law form. The peculiarities of the inflationary process can lead to…
We consider the stimulated emission of gravitons from an initial state of thermal equilibrium, under the action of the cosmic gravitational background field. We find that the low-energy graviton spectrum is enhanced if compared with…
Using the most recent data from the WMAP, ACT and SPT experiments, we update the constraints on models with oscillatory features in the primordial power spectrum of scalar perturbations. This kind of features can appear in models of…
Observations of the microwave background fluctuations suggest a scale-dependent amplitude asymmetry of roughly 2.5 sigma significance. Inflationary explanations for this 'anomaly' require non-Gaussian fluctuations which couple observable…
The sensitivity of inflationary spectra to initial conditions is addressed in the context of a phenomenological model that breaks Lorentz invariance by dissipative effects above some threshold energy $\Lambda$. These effects are obtained…
Standard inflation with one scalar field produces primordial perturbations with a nearly flat ('Harrison-Zeldovich') power spectrum. Here we consider first, a double inflation spectrum, and second, a massive scalar field with an interaction…
Inspired by quantum gravitational physics, the approach of non-commutative (NC) phase space leads to a modified dispersion relation of gravitational waves. This feature, if applied to the very early universe, gives rise to a modified power…
We examine cosmological perturbations in a dynamical theory of inflation in which an Abelian gauge field couples directly to the inflaton, breaking conformal invariance. When the coupling between the gauge field and the inflaton takes a…
We carry out the determination of the amplitude of relic gravitational waves power spectrum. Indirect best-fit technique was applied to compare observational data and theory predictions. As observations we have used data on large-scale…
We investigate the noncommutative effect on the non-Gaussianities of primordial cosmological perturbation. In the lowest order of string length and slow-roll parameter, we find that in the models with small speed of sound the noncommutative…
The generic prediction for the perturbations generated during slow--roll, single--field inflation, as they appear in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), is a flat, close--to--Gaussian spectrum. We calculate the general solution for a…
The effect of the length of inflation on the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations is estimated using the power-law inflation model with a scale factor of a(t) = t^q. Considering various pre-inflation models with…
If inflation was preceded by a radiation era then at the time of inflation there will exist a decoupled thermal distribution of gravitons. Gravitational waves generated during inflation will be amplified by the process of stimulated…
Thermal inflation is a second epoch of exponential expansion at typical energy scales $V^{1/4} \sim 10^{6 \sim 8} \mathrm{GeV}$. If the usual primordial inflation is followed by thermal inflation, the primordial power spectrum is only…
We extend and improve the modeling and analysis of large-amplitude, sharp inflationary steps for second order corrections required by the precision of the Planck CMB power spectrum and for arbitrary Dirac-Born-Infeld sound speed. With two…
Recently, we have shown that the propagation speed $c_T$ of the primordial gravitational waves (GWs) might be nontrivially varying during inflation, which could induce local oscillations in the power spectrum of primordial GWs. In this…
We reconsider trans-Planckian corrections to inflationary spectra by taking into account a physical effect which has been overlooked and which could have important consequences. We assume that the short length scale characterizing the new…
We investigate whether non-adiabatic perturbations from inflation could produce an asymmetric distribution of temperature anisotropies on large angular scales in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We use a generalised non-linear $\delta…