Related papers: A Meandering Inflaton
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
As is well known there are many different inflationary models that can explain the accelerated expansion occurred in the early Universe. It is possible that there exists a fundamental property of this period that could provide the…
We study quantum fluctuations of a free massless scalar field during inflation in the presence of a point, line, or plane defect such as a black hole, cosmic string, or domain wall, using a perturbative expansion in powers of small defect…
We briefly review the arising of an inflationary phase in the Universe evolution in order to discuss an inhomogeneous cosmological solution in presence of a real self interacting scalar field minimally coupled to gravity in the region of a…
We study initial conditions for inflation in scenarios where the inflaton potential has a plateau shape. Such models are those most favored by Planck data and can be obtained in a large number of model classes. As a representative example,…
Recently it was argued that an inflationary potential yielding power spectra characterized by a scale-invariant tensorial spectral index and a weakly scale-dependent scalar spectral index might account for a generic large-scale structure…
In the standard cosmological picture the Universe underwent a brief period of near-exponential expansion, known as Inflation. This provides an explanation for structure formation through the amplification of perturbations by the rapid…
Usual inflation is realized with a slow rolling scalar field minimally coupled to gravity. In contrast, we consider dynamics of a scalar with a flat effective potential, conformally coupled to gravity. Surprisingly, it contains an attractor…
We derive general analytic formulae for the power spectrum and spectral index of the curvature perturbation produced during inflation driven by a multi-component inflaton field, up to the second order in the slow-roll approximation. We do…
We show that it is possible to combine an early phase of String Gas Cosmology which can explain the origin of the observed structures on cosmological scales with a short later period of power law inflation which creates spatial flatness.…
The most important criteria for a successful inflation are to explain the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the Standard Model quarks and…
We study an effective 4-dimensional scalar-tensor field theory, originated from an underlying brane-bulk warped geometry, to explore the scenario of inflation. It is shown that the inflaton potential naturally emerges from the radion…
We study models of modular inflation of the form expected to arise from low energy effective actions of superstring theories. We argue on general grounds that the most likely models of modular slow-roll inflation are small field models in…
We consider a k-essence model in which a single scalar field can be responsible for both primordial inflation and the present observed acceleration of the cosmological background geometry, while also admitting a nonsingular de Sitter…
We discuss a new scenario for early cosmology, when inflationary de Sitter phase dynamically emergent. This genuine quantum effect occurs as a result of dynamics of the topologically nontrivial sectors in a (conjectured) strongly coupled…
Cosmological inflation is studied in the case where the inflaton is the overall modulus $T$ for an orbifold. General forms of the (non-perturbative) superpotential are considered to ensure that $G=K+{\rm ln}|W|^2$ is modular invariant. We…
I investigate multi-field inflationary models with fields that decay during inflation, leading to staggered inflation. This feature is natural in many models motivated by string theory, for instance if inflatons are related to interbrane…
Multiple axions form a landscape in the presence of various shift symmetry breaking terms. Eternal inflation populates the axion landscape, continuously creating new universes by bubble nucleation. Slow-roll inflation takes place after the…
Cosmic inflation is the cornerstone of modern cosmology. In particular, following the Planck mission reports presented in 2015 regarding cosmic microwave background (CMB), there is an increasing interest in searching for inflaton candidates…
We investigate the inflationary universe in a theory where two scalar fields non-minimally coupling to the scalar curvature and an extra $R^2$ term exist and the conformal invariance is broken. In particular, the slow-roll inflation is…