Related papers: Inflation with General Initial Conditions for Scal…
In quasi-single field inflation models, massive isocurvature modes, that are coupled to the inflaton and have mass of order the Hubble parameter, can have nontrivial impacts on density perturbations, especially non-Gaussianities. We study a…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
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. We first present a simple toy model…
We study implications of perturbative unitarity for quasi-single field inflation with the inflaton and one massive scalar. Analyzing high energy scattering, we show that non-Gaussianities with $|f_{\rm NL}|\gtrsim1$ cannot be realized…
We examine a scalar-tensor model of gravity that is globally scale-invariant. When adapted to a spatially flat Robertson-Walker metric, the equations of motion describe a dynamical system that flows from an unstable de Sitter space to a…
We prove that the stochastic and standard field-theoretical approaches produce exactly the same results for the amount of light massive scalar field fluctuations generated during inflation in the leading order of the slow-roll…
We argue that a plausible operational definition for an initial state of the Universe is the initial quantum state of the curvature perturbations generated during inflation. We provide a parameterization of this state and generalize the…
The n-point correlation functions in single-field inflation obey a set of consistency conditions in the exact squeezed limit which are not present in multi-field models, and thus are powerful tools to distinguish between the two. However,…
We present a complete computation of the scalar power spectrum in the \emph{inflation without inflaton} (IWI) framework, where the inflationary expansion is driven solely by a de~Sitter (dS) background and scalar fluctuations arise as…
Since inflationary perturbations must generically couple to all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe, it is more realistic to view these fluctuations as an open quantum system interacting with an environment. Then, on very…
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…
Polarizations of primordial gravitational waves can be relevant when considering inflationary universe in modified gravity or when matter fields survive during inflation. Such polarizations have been discussed in the Bunch-Davies vacuum.…
We consider a quantum deformation of the wave equation on a cosmological background as a toy-model for possible trans-Planckian effects. We compute the power spectrum of scalar and tensor fluctuations for power-law inflation, and find a…
An investigation is undertaken into the properties and effects of a preinflationary era during at least part of which semiclassical gravity was valid. It is argued that if the Universe (or our part of it) was approximately homogeneous and…
We study a two-parameter family of exactly solvable inflation models with variable sound speed, and derive a corresponding exact expression for the spectrum of curvature perturbations. We generalize this expression to the slow roll case,…
We study the dynamics of inflation in a generalized scalar-torsion gravity scenario by assuming a canonical scalar field non-minimally coupled to torsion with a Galileon-type self-interaction. After obtaining the field equations for a flat…
We investigate the quantum fluctuations of an inflaton field in a two-field model of one-bubble open inflation. One of the inflatons is assumed to be responsible for the first false vacuum stage of inflation and the other is assumed to be…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
Chain Inflation is an alternative to slow roll inflation in which the universe undergoes a series of transitions between different vacua. The density perturbations (studied in this paper) are seeded by the probabilistic nature of tunneling…
We perform a numerical investigation of the fields evolution in the supersymmetric inflationary model based on radiative corrections. Supergravity corrections are also included. We find that, out of all the examined initial data, only about…