Related papers: Gravity and non-gravity mediated couplings in mult…
The interplay among the possible variation of gauge coupling and the inflationary dynamics is investigated in a simplified toy model. Depending upon various parameters (scalar mass, curvature scale at the end of inflation and at the onset…
Non-Gaussianities of the primordial density perturbations have emerged as a very powerful possible signal to test the dynamics that drove the period of inflation. While in general the most sensitive observable is the three-point function in…
We propose a model for cosmic inflation which is based on an effective description of strongly interacting, nonsupersymmetric matter within the framework of dynamical abelian projection and centerization. The underlying gauge symmetry is…
The theory and methodology is developed to compute the bispectrum in warm inflation, leading to results for the non-linearity parameter and the shape of the bispectrum. Particular attention is paid to the study of the bispectrum in the…
It is well known that light scalar fields present during inflation are coherently excited. We show that if the field couples to gravity in a non-minimal way, the fluctuations at large scales are suppressed with respect to the small scales…
Reheating after R^2 inflation proceeds through gravitational particle production of conformally noninvariant fields. We argue that the nonvanishing expectation value of flat directions generic in supersymmetric theories break conformal…
We consider gravitational clustering from primoridal non-Gaussian fluctuations provided by a $\chi^2$ model, as motivated by some models of inflation. The emphasis is in signatures that can be used to constrain this type of models from…
A field kinetic coupling with the Einstein tensor leads to a gravitationally enhanced friction during inflation, by which even steep potentials with theoretically natural model parameters can drive cosmic acceleration. In the presence of…
We investigate the predictions of inflation models with a non-minimal coupling to gravity for inflationary observables such as the spectral index and tensor-to-scalar ratio in a general setting. We argue that, depending on the relation…
We study a theory which generalizes the nonminimal coupling of matter to gravity by including derivative couplings. This leads to several interesting new dynamical phenomena in cosmology. In particular, the range of parameters in which…
We study the non-Gaussianity generated during multiple-field inflation. We provide an exact expression for the bispectrum parameter f_NL which is valid beyond the slow-roll regime, valid for certain classes of inflationary models. We then…
Primordial non-Gaussianity is generated by interactions of the inflaton field, either self-interactions or couplings to other sectors. These two physically different mechanisms can lead to nearly indistinguishable bispectra of the…
We investigate the possibility that nonlinear gravitational effects influence the preheating era after inflation. Our work is based on numerical solutions of the inhomogeneous Einstein field equations, and is free of perturbative…
Within the framework of hybrid metric-Palatini gravity, we incorporate non-localities introduced via the inverse of the d'Alembert operators acting on the scalar curvature. We analyse the dynamical structure of the theory and, adopting a…
Recently it has become clear that the resonant amplification of quantum field fluctuations at preheating must be accompanied by resonant amplification of scalar metric perturbations, since the two are united by Einstein's equations.…
In a variety of models the motion of the inflaton may trigger the production of some non-inflaton particles during inflation, for example via parametric resonance or a phase transition. Such models have attracted interest recently for a…
We examine the effective theory of single-field inflation in the limit where the scalar perturbations propagate with a small speed of sound. In this case the non-linearly realized time-translation symmetry of the Lagrangian implies large…
We explore in the supergravity context the possibility that a Higgs scalar may drive inflation via a non-minimal coupling to gravity characterised by a large dimensionless coupling constant. We find that this scenario is not compatible with…
The inflationary paradigm has enjoyed phenomenological success, however, a compelling particle physics realization is still lacking. The key obstruction is that the requirement of a suitably flat scalar potential is sensitive to…
A model of multi-component hybrid inflation, dubbed multi-brid inflation, in which various observable quantities including the non-Gaussianity parameter f_{NL} can be analytically calculated was proposed recently. In particular, for a…