Related papers: Delayed Reheating and the Breakdown of Coherent Os…
We review the relation between the inflationary potential and the spectra of density (scalar) perturbations and gravitational waves (tensor perturbations) produced, with particular emphasis on the possibility of reconstructing the inflaton…
In the context of quantum fields in time dependent classical backgrounds, we notice that the number of created particles with a given momentum largely deviates about its mean value. Guided with this observation we use a complete orthonormal…
Quantum fluctuations of an inflaton field, slow-rolling during inflation are coupled to metric fluctuations. In conventional four dimensional cosmology one can calculate the effect of scalar metric perturbations as slow-roll corrections to…
It has recently been shown that specific non-perturbative effects may lead to an explosive decay of flat direction condensates in supersymmetric theories. We confirm explicitly the efficiency of this process with lattice simulations: after…
We investigate the possibility that the amplitude of scalar density perturbations may be damped after inflation. This would imply that CMB anisotropies do not uniquely fix the amplitude of the perturbations generated during inflation and…
Plateau inflation is an experimentally consistent framework in which the scale of inflation can be kept relatively low. Close to the edge of the plateau, scalar perturbations are subject to a strong tachyonic instability. Tachyonic…
The behaviour of quantum metric perturbations produced during inflation is considered at the stage after the second Hubble radius crossing. It is shown that the classical correlation between amplitude and momentum of a perturbation mode,…
We study both the background evolution and cosmological perturbations of anisotropic inflationary models supported by coupled scalar and vector fields. The models we study preserve the U(1) gauge symmetry associated with the vector field,…
We investigate the dependence of the gravitational wave spectrum from quintessential inflation on the reheating process. We consider two extreme reheating processes. One is the gravitational reheating by particle creation in the expanding…
The process of reheating the universe after hybrid inflation is extremely violent. It proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in bubble-like structures, which generate a significant…
Because of the non-linearity of the Einstein equations, the cosmological fluctuations which are generated during inflation on a wide range of wavelengths do not evolve independently. In particular, to second order in perturbation theory,…
Cosmological perturbations of massive higher-spin fields are generated during inflation, but they decay on scales larger than the Hubble radius as a consequence of the Higuchi bound. By introducing suitable couplings to the inflaton field,…
We show that density perturbations seeded by the inflaton can be suppressed when having additional light degrees of freedom contributing to the production of perturbations. The inflaton fluctuations affect the light field dynamics by…
We give a comprehensive analysis of how scalar and tensor perturbations evolve in cosmologies with a smooth transition from power-law-like and de Sitter-like inflation to a radiation era. Analytic forms for the super-horizon and sub-horizon…
In an alternative mechanism recently proposed, adiabatic cosmological perturbations are generated at the decay of the inflaton field due to small fluctuations of its coupling to matter. This happens whenever the coupling is governed by the…
We investigate the production of gravitational waves during preheating after inflation in the common case of field potentials that are asymmetric around the minimum. In particular, we study the impact of oscillons, comparatively long lived…
The Peccei-Quinn mechanism suffers from the problem of the isocurvature perturbations. The isocurvature perturbations are suppressed if the Peccei-Quinn breaking scale is large during inflation. The oscillation of the Peccei-Quinn breaking…
We investigate the end of the inflationary period in the recently proposed scenario of locked inflation, and consider various constraints arising from density perturbations, loop corrections, parametric resonance and defect formation. We…
We consider the evolution of scalar perturbations in a class of non-singular bouncing universes obtained with higher-order corrections to the low-energy bosonic string action. We show that previous studies have relied on a singular…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…