Related papers: Predictions of just-enough inflation
We present counter examples to the claim that the $\lambda \phi^4$ inflaton potential is excluded by recent cosmological data. Finding counter examples requires that the actually observed primordial fluctuations are generated at the onset…
An early stage of kinetic energy domination for inflation is applied to single-field quadratic and hybrid-type potentials considering only the amount of inflation necessary to solve the problems of the standard cosmological scenario. Using…
We propose a version of chaotic inflation, in which a fundamental scale M, well below the Planck scale M_P, fixes the initial value of the effective potential. If this scale happens to be the scale of grand unified theories, there are just…
The observational constraints on the primordial power spectrum have tightened considerably with the release of the first year analysis of the WMAP observations, especially when combined with the results from other CMB experiments and galaxy…
We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…
At the level of heuristic effective dynamics, we investigate the cosmological inflation with holonomy corrections of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) in the $k=0$ Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model with a single inflaton field subject to a simple…
If the inflationary era is preceded by a radiation dominated era in which the inflaton too was in thermal equilibrium at some very early time then the CMB data places an upper bound on the comoving temperature of the (decoupled) inflaton…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
We calculate power spectra of cosmological perturbations at high accuracy for two classes of inflation models. We classify the models according to the behaviour of the Hubble distance during inflation. Our approximation works if the Hubble…
We examine observational constraints on chaotic inflation models in the Randall-Sundrum Type II braneworld. If inflation takes place in the high-energy regime, the perturbations produced by the quadratic potential are further from…
A self-consistent pre-inflationary extension of the inflationary scenario with the Starobinsky potential, favored by Planck data, is studied using techniques from loop quantum cosmology (LQC). The results are compared with the quadratic…
We show that in the simplest theories of spontaneous symmetry breaking one can have a stage of a fast-roll inflation. In this regime the standard slow-roll condition |m^2| << H^2 is violated. Nevertheless, this stage can be rather long if…
We investigate how various inflationary and bouncing cosmologies can be realized by imperfect fluids with a generalized equation of state, in the context of both classical and loop quantum cosmology. With regards to the inflationary…
If a coupling between the inflaton and the Gauss-Bonnet term is introduced, many models of inflation that were ruled out by the most recent Planck data can be made viable again. The predictions for the scalar spectral index and…
We show that models of `just enough' inflation, where the slow-roll evolution lasted only $50-60$ e-foldings, feature modifications of the CMB power spectrum at large angular scales. We perform a systematic and model-independent analysis of…
We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The…
Many inflating spacetimes are likely to violate the weak energy condition, a key assumption of singularity theorems. Here we offer a simple kinematical argument, requiring no energy condition, that a cosmological model which is inflating --…
Cosmological inflation is the dominating paradigm to account for observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In this thesis, we study the phenomenology of a class of particularly well motivated models of inflation, known under…
I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…