Related papers: Nonlocal Inflation
Heavy scalar fields can undergo an instability during inflation as a result of their kinetic couplings with the inflaton. This is known as the geometrical destabilization of inflation, as it relies on the effect of the negative curvature of…
Little is known about the microscopic physics that gave rise to inflation in our universe. There are many reasons to wonder if the underlying description requires a careful arrangement of ingredients or if inflation was the result of an…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
We investigate inflation with a class of concave inflaton potentials of the form $\sim \phi^n$ $(0<n<1)$ in the Randall-Sundrum model with an infinite extra spatial dimension. We show that this class of models is much more in good agreement…
Towards the end of the brane inflationary epoch in the brane world, cosmic strings (but not texture, domain walls or monopoles) are copiously produced during brane collision. These cosmic strings are D$p$-branes with $(p-1)$ dimensions…
Infinite order differential equations have come to play an increasingly significant role in theoretical physics. Field theories with infinitely many derivatives are ubiquitous in string field theory and have attracted interest recently also…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
We show that the parameter space for F-term inflation which predict the formation of cosmic strings is larger than previously estimated. Firstly, because realistic embeddings in GUT theories alter the standard scenerio, making the…
A generic non-minimal coupling can push any higher-order terms of the scalar potential sufficiently far out in field space to yield observationally viable plateau inflation. We provide analytic and numerical evidence that this generically…
We develop a model of eternal topological inflation using a racetrack potential within the context of type IIB string theory with KKLT volume stabilization. The inflaton field is the imaginary part of the K\"ahler structure modulus, which…
We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of non-critical string theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production in the…
Taking field theory seriously, inflation model-building is difficult but not impossible. The observed value of the spectral index of the adiabatic density perturbation is starting to discriminate between models, and may well pick out a…
We draw attention to the possibility that inflation (i.e. accelerated expansion) might continue after the end of slow roll, during a period of fast oscillations of the inflaton field \phi . This phenomenon takes place when a mild…
The potential during inflation must be very flat in, at least, the direction of the inflaton. In renormalizable global supersymmetry, flat directions are ubiquitous, but they are not preserved in a generic supergravity theory. It is known…
We investigate models in which inflation is driven by an ultraviolet safe and interacting scalar sector stemming from a new class of nonsupersymmetric gauge field theories. These new theories, differently from generic scalar models, are…
We review the theory of inflation with single and multiple fields paying particular attention to the dynamics of adiabatic and entropy/isocurvature perturbations which provide the primary means of testing inflationary models. We review the…
We investigate the possibility that spiral inflation can be realized using the near-conifold flux potentials for the complex structure moduli in type IIB string theory compactified on a Calabi-Yau manifold. Using the explicit form of the…
We develop a cosmological model where primordial inflation is driven by a 'solid', defined as a system of three derivatively coupled scalar fields obeying certain symmetries and spontaneously breaking a certain subgroup of these. The…
It is conjectured that inflation, taking account of quantum gravity, leads to a discrete spectrum of cosmological perturbations, instead of the continuous Gaussian spectrum predicted by standard field theory in an unquantized background.…
The standard mechanism for producing the observed scale-invariant power spectrum from adiabatic vacuum fluctuations relies on first order derivative of fields in the action for curvature perturbations. It has been proven…