Related papers: Inflation with a Weyl term, or ghosts at work
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
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…
The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the…
We study a symmetry, schematically Energy -> - Energy, which suppresses matter contributions to the cosmological constant. The requisite negative energy fluctuations are identified with a "ghost" copy of the Standard Model. Gravity…
After a brief review of the theory of cosmological perturbations, I highlight some recent progress in the area of reheating in inflationary cosmology, focusing in particular on parametric amplification of super-Hubble cosmological…
Inflation of cosmic gauge and global strings is investigated by numerically solving the combined Einstein and field equations. Above some critical symmetry-breaking scales, the strings undergo inflation along the radial direction as well as…
Inflation with tunneling from a false to a true vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a scalar field that slows down the initial de Sitter phase. As a by-product this field also sets dynamically the value of the Newton constant observed…
A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…
The motivation for studying the rolling tachyon and non-commutative inflation comes from string theory. In the tachyon inflation scenario, metric perturbations are created by tachyon field fluctuations during inflation. We drive the exact…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
In this work we investigate the inflationary phenomenological implications of a recently developed ghost-free Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity. The resulting theory can be viewed as a scalar Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet theory of gravity, so by…
We consider a Weyl-invariant formulation of gravity with a cosmological constant in d-dimensional spacetime and show that near two dimensions the classical action reduces to the timelike Liouville action. We show that the renormalized…
Assuming the existence of a cosmological constant depending on time, we study the evolution of this field in a local region of spacetime. Solving the standard equations of Einstein Relativity in the weak field approximation we find two…
A brief introduction to the gauge invariant classical and quantum theory of cosmological perturbations is given. The formalism is applied to inflationary Universe models and yields a consistent and unified description of the generation and…
We study the cosmological perturbations created during the New Higgs inflationary phase. In the New Higgs Inflation, the Higgs boson is kinetically coupled to the Einstein tensor and only three perturbative degrees of freedom, a scalar and…
Cosmological perturbations generated during inflation exhibit striking quantum features, including entanglement and high circuit complexity. Yet their observational signatures remain effectively indistinguishable from classical stochastic…
We investigate the models of cosmological inflation in generalized scalar-tensor gravity, which we consider as a source of deviation from de Sitter dynamics in the case of GR. Within the framework of the proposed approach, the exact…
We consider an additional fine-tuning problem which afflicts scalar-driven models of inflation. The problem is that successful reheating requires the inflaton be coupled to ordinary matter, and quantum fluctuations of this matter induces…
The motion of a pseudo-scalar field $X$ during inflation naturally induces a significant amplification of the gauge fields to which it is coupled. The amplified gauge fields can source characteristic scalar and tensor primordial…
In a class of non-singular cosmologies derived from higher-order corrections to the low-energy bosonic string action, we derive evolution equations for the most general cosmological scalar, vector and tensor perturbations. In the large…