Related papers: Daemon Decay and Inflation
The radial direction of the Peccei--Quinn field can drive cosmic inflation, given a non-minimal coupling to gravity. This scenario has been considered to simultaneously explain inflation, the strong $CP$ problem, and dark matter. We argue…
A gravity-driven inflation is shown to arise from a simple higher dimensional universe. In vacuum, the shear of $n>1$ contracting dimensions is able to inflate the remaining three spatial dimensions. Said another way, the expansion of the…
Dynamical models of inflation are given with composite inflatons by means of massive supersymmetric gauge theory. Nearly flat directions and stable massive ones in the potential are identified and slow-roll during inflation is examined.…
A wide variety of vacua, and their cosmological realization, may provide an explanation for the apparently anthropic choices of some parameters of particle physics and cosmology. If the probability on various parameters is weighted by…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
In previous works we have derived a Running Vacuum Model (RVM) for a string Universe, which provides an effective description of the evolution of 4-dimensional string-inspired cosmologies from inflation till the present epoch. In the…
We propose a new scenario for early cosmology, where an inflationary de Sitter phase is obtained with a ghost condensate. The transition to radiation dominance is triggered by the ghost itself, without any slow-roll potential. Density…
Recent results from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments verify several of the predictions of inflation, while ruling out a number of alternative structure-formation scenarios. Given the successes of the theory, the obvious next…
Recently Peebles and Vilenkin proposed and quantitatively analyzed the fascinating idea that a substantial fraction of the present cosmic energy density could reside in the vacuum potential energy of the scalar field responsible for…
These lecture notes provide a pedagogical introduction to some aspects of the inflationary cosmology, including the background scalar field dynamics, generation of primordial seed perturbations via quantum fluctuations during inflation, and…
In this review I briefly describe the evolution of the inflationary theory from the scenario based on the idea of supercooling and expansion in the false vacuum toward the theory of eternally expanding self-reproducing inflationary…
We study the production of dark matter and dark radiation after reheating in string inflation models where the Calabi-Yau has a fibred structure and the visible sector lives on D3 branes. We show how the interplay between different physical…
A scenario with two subsequent periods of inflationary expansion in the very early universe is examined. The model is based on a potential motivated by symmetries being found in field theory at high energy. For various parameter sets of the…
A variant of hybrid inflation which is applicable in a wide class of supersymmetric grand unified models and reproduces the observed temperature perturbations of cosmic background radiation with natural values of the parameters is…
In the framework of Born-Infeld inspired gravity theories, which deviates from General Relativity (GR) in the high curvature regime, we discuss the viability of Cosmic Inflation without scalar fields. For energy densities higher than the…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
Cosmic inflation may exhibit stochastic periods during which quantum fluctuations dominate over the semi-classical evolution. Extracting observables in these regimes is a notoriously difficult program as quantum randomness makes them fully…
Time evolution of tunneling phenomena proceeding in thermal medium is studied using a standard model of environment interaction. A semiclassical probability formula for the particle motion in a metastable state of one dimensional system put…
In this thesis we will primarily demonstrate how additional scalar degrees of freedom - which are motivated from many high-energy embeddings - open up new observational windows onto the physics of inflation. We construct a Bayesian…