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Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density…
Ekpyrotic bouncing cosmologies have been proposed as alternatives to inflation. In these scenarios, the universe is smoothed and flattened during a period of slow contraction preceding the bounce while quantum fluctuations generate nearly…
The large tensor spectrum recently observed by the BICEP2 Collaboration requires a super-Planckian field variation of the inflaton in the single-field inflationary scenario. The required slow-roll parameter \epsilon \approx 0.01 would…
We study the evolution of quantum fluctuations of gravity around an inflationary solution in renormalizable quantum gravity, in which the initial scalar-fluctuation dominance is shown by the background-free nature expressed by a special…
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…
We study an extension of the natural inflation model comprising a non-Abelian gauge sector coupled to the axion-inflaton kinetic term. We show how such non-minimal coupling serves as a source of friction for the rolling inflaton granting…
I generalize the three-point amplitude of curvature perturbations in the climbing scenario inspired by ten-dimensional non-supersymmetric strings to a broader class of exponential potentials, under some assumptions on the smoothing effects…
We study cosmological perturbations in a universe with only one matter component described by a triplet of fields. Configuration of these fields is the same as for body coordinates of a solid, and they enter the matter Lagrangian only…
If the spatial curvature of the universe is positive, then the curvature term will always dominate at early enough times in a slow-rolling inflationary epoch. This enhances inflationary effects and hence puts limits on the possible number…
The gauge-independent invariant approach to investigation of the linear scalar perturbations of inflaton and gravitational fields is developed in self-consistent way. This approach allows to compare various gauges used by other researchers…
It has been conjectured that the speed of sound in holographic models with UV fixed points has an upper bound set by the value of the quantity in conformal field theory. If true, this would set stringent constraints for the presence of…
We analyse field fluctuations during an Ultra Slow-Roll phase in the stochastic picture of inflation and the resulting non-Gaussian curvature perturbation, fully including the gravitational backreaction of the field's velocity. By working…
We analyze the curvaton scenario in the context of supersymmety. Supersymmetric theories contain many scalars, and therefore many curvaton candidates. To obtain a scale invariant perturbation spectrum, the curvaton mass should be small…
Inflation can be supported in very steep potentials if it is generated by rapidly turning fields, which can be natural in negatively curved field spaces. The curvature perturbation, $\zeta$, of these models undergoes an exponential,…
We consider slow-roll inflation in the context of recently proposed four-dimensional effective gravity induced on the world-volume of a three-brane in five-dimensional Einstein gravity. We find significant modifications of the simplest…
In the slow-roll inflationary scenario, the amplitude of the curvature perturbations approaches a constant value soon after the modes leave the Hubble radius. However, relatively recently, it was shown that the amplitude of the curvature…
Critical phenomena arise ubiquitously in various context of physics, from condensed matter, high energy physics, cosmology, to biological systems, and consist of slow and long-distance fluctuations near a phase transition or critical point.…
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…
We study adiabatic and isocurvature perturbation spectra produced by a period of cosmological inflation driven by two scalar fields. We show that there exists a model-independent consistency condition for all two-field models of slow-roll…
The linear and quadratic perturbations for a scalar-tensor model with non-minimal coupling to curvature, coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet invariant and non-minimal kinetic coupling to the Einstein tensor are developed. The quadratic action for…