Related papers: The Overshoot Problem in Inflation after Tunneling
In a previous paper, two of the authors presented a "regulated" picture of eternal inflation. This picture both suggested and drew support from a conjectured discontinuity in the amplitude for tunneling from positive to negative vacuum…
Inflationary models, especially those with plateau-type potentials, are consistent with the cosmological data, but inflation itself does not resolve the initial singularity. This singularity is resolved, for example, by the idea of the…
We study multifield contributions to the scalar power spectrum in an ensemble of six-field inflationary models obtained in string theory. We identify examples in which inflation occurs by chance, near an approximate inflection point, and we…
We analyze constraints on parameters characterizing the pre-inflating universe in an open inflation model with a present slightly open $\Lambda$CDM universe. We employ an analytic model to show that for a broad class of inflation-generating…
In this work we elaborate on solving the trans-Planckian censorship problem of standard slow-roll inflation by using a power-law inflationary tail generated by a scalar field with an exponential potential. We use a quantitative approach by…
We show that the initial field values required to produce inflation in the two fields original hybrid model, and its supergravity F-term extension, do not suffer from any fine-tuning problem, even when the fields are restricted to be…
We investigate the possibility that the Universe may inflate due to moduli fields, corresponding to flat directions of supersymmetry, lifted by supergravity corrections. Using a hybrid-type potential we obtain a two-stage inflationary…
The previous proposal (by two of us) of chain inflation with the QCD axion is shown to fail. The proposal involved a series of fast tunneling events, yet here it is shown that tunneling is too slow. We calculate the bubble nucleation rates…
In this paper we illustrate an interesting example of low scale inflation with an extremely large number of e-foldings. This realization can be implemented easily in hybrid inflation model where usually inflation ends via phase transition.…
We investigate the validity of effective field theory methods and the decoupling of heavy fields during inflation. Considering models of inflation in which the inflaton is coupled to a heavy (super-Hubble) degree of freedom initially in its…
We explore the possibility that inflation is driven by supersymmetry breaking with the superpartner of the goldstino (sgoldstino) playing the role of the inflaton. Moreover, we impose an R-symmetry that allows to satisfy easily the…
We investigate a class of models of topological inflation in which a super-Hubble-sized global monopole seeds inflation. These models are attractive since inflation starts from rather generic initial conditions, but their not so attractive…
The conceptual problems of the standard slow-roll inflationary scenario include the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture issue, which severely restricts the tensor-to-scalar ratio in the standard minimally coupled scalar field inflation.…
Recently, it was showed that there is a large N phase transition in Nflation, in which when the number of fields is large enough, the slow roll inflation phase will disappear. In this brief report, we illustrate the phase diagram for…
A model of a universe without big bang singularity is presented, which displaysanearly inflationary period ending just before a phase transition to a deflationary epoch. The model produces enough heavy particles so as to reheat the universe…
We consider inflation driven near a saddle point in a higher dimensional field space, which is the most likely type of slow roll inflation on the string theoretical landscape; anthropic arguments need to be invoked in order to find a…
There are well-known criteria on the potential and field-space geometry for determining if slow-roll, slow-turn, multi-field inflation is possible. However, even though it has been a topic of much recent interest, slow-roll, rapid-turn…
Last year we argued that if slow-roll inflation followed the decay of a false vacuum in a large landscape, the steepening of the scalar potential between the inflationary plateau and the barrier generically leads to a potentially observable…
There is an apparent power deficit relative to the $\Lambda$CDM prediction of the CMB spectrum at large scales, which, though not yet statistically significant, persists from WMAP to Planck data. Proposals that invoke some form of initial…
We consider the robustness of small-field inflation in the presence of scalar field inhomogeneities. Previous numerical work has shown that if the scalar potential is flat only over a narrow interval, such as in commonly considered…