Related papers: Can slow roll inflation induce relevant helical ma…
As additional perturbative degrees of freedom, it is known that magnetic fields of inflationary origin can source curvature perturbations on super-Hubble scales. By requiring the magnetic generated curvature to remain smaller than its…
The hot plasma above the electroweak scale contains (hyper) charged scalar particles which are coupled to Abelian gauge fields. Scalars may interact with gravity in a non-conformally invariant way and thus their fluctuations can be…
During cosmological inflation, it has been suggested that fields coupled to the inflaton can be excited by the slow-rolling inflaton into a quasi-stable non-vacuum state. Within this scenario of ``warm inflation'', this could allow for a…
We calculate the scalar gravitational and matter perturbations in the context of slow-roll inflation with multiple scalar fields, that take values on a (curved) manifold, to first order in slow roll. For that purpose a basis for these…
Generically, the gravitational-wave or tensor-mode contribution to the primordial curvature spectrum of inflation is tiny if the field-range of the inflaton is much smaller than the Planck scale. We show that this pessimistic conclusion is…
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…
We consider a model of inflation in which the inflaton field is a rolling axion with a potential which is flat enough to support an intermediate phase of USR inflation. Because of the Chern-Simons interaction, one polarization of the gauge…
In the cold inflation scenario, the slow roll inflation and reheating via coherent rapid oscillation, are usually considered as two distinct eras. When the slow roll ends, a rapid oscillation phase begins and the inflaton decays to…
With an energy scale that can be as high as $10^{14}\,{\rm GeV}$, inflation may provide a unique probe of high-energy physics. Both scalar and tensor fluctuations generated during this early accelerated expansion contain crucial information…
Inflation has the potential to seed the galactic magnetic fields observed today. However, there is an obstacle to the amplification of the quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field during inflation: namely the conformal invariance…
We construct a string-inspired nonsingular cosmological scenario in which an inflaton field is driven up the potential before the graceful exit by employing a low-energy string effective action with an orbifold compactification. This sets…
We revisit axion monodromy inflation in the context of UV-inspired models and point out that its cosmological observables are sensitive to heavy fields with masses far above the Hubble scale, such as the moduli of flux compactifications. By…
We investigate radiative corrections to the inflaton potential from heavy fields undergoing a fast-roll phase transition. We find that a logarithmic one-loop correction to the inflaton potential involving this field can induce a temporary…
We study the effects of particle production on the evolution of the inflaton field in an axion monodromy model with the goal of discovering in which situations the resulting dynamics will be consistent with the {\it swampland constraints}.…
During hybrid inflation, the slowly-rolling inflaton field has a significant coupling to the trigger field which is responsible for most of the potential. Barring a fine-tuned accidental cancellation, this coupling induces a minimal…
We consider the possibility of inflationary magnetogenesis due to dynamical couplings of the electromagnetic fields to gravity. We find that large primordial magnetic fields can be generated during inflation without the strong coupling…
Generation of magnetic fields during inflation is a promising mechanism for the origin of the observed large scale magnetic fields in the universe. Among several attempts, a popular model is one where the inflaton and the electromagnetic…
In this work, we consider homogeneous oscillations of the inflaton field after inflation. In particular, we obtain an analytical result for the (average) equation of state for the oscillating inflaton field for the simplest…
We study magnetogenesis in axionlike inflation driven by a pseudoscalar field $\phi$ coupled axially to the electromagnetic (EM) field $(\beta/M_{p})\phi F_{\mu\nu}\tilde{F}^{\mu\nu}$ with dimensionless coupling constant $\beta$. A set of…
We revisit the efficiency of Schwinger mechanism in creating charged pairs during inflation. We consider a minimal setup of inflation in which the inflaton field is a complex scalar field charged under a $U(1)$ gauge field. There is a time…