Related papers: Non-Gaussian bubbles in the sky
A pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, with a potential of the form $ V(\phi) = \Lambda^4 [1 + \cos(\phi/f)]$, can naturally give rise to an epoch of inflation in the early universe (Freese, Frieman, and Olinto 1990). The potential is naturally…
Inflationary cosmology successfully accounts for the observed properties of primordial fluctuations using quantum field theory in an expanding background. However, the quantum nature of these fluctuations has not been experimentally…
The detection of a stochastic Gravitational Wave (GW) background sourced by a cosmological phase transition would allow us to see the early Universe from a completely new perspective, illuminating aspects of Beyond the Standard Model (BSM)…
Curvatons are light (compared to the Hubble scale during inflation) spectator fields during inflation that potentially contribute to adiabatic curvature perturbations post-inflation. They can alter CMB observables such as the spectral index…
The statistics of primordial curvature fluctuations are our window into the period of inflation, where these fluctuations were generated. To date, the cosmic microwave background has been the dominant source of information about these…
Quantum origin of the early inflationary Universe from the no-boundary and tunnelling quantum states is considered in the one-loop approximation of quantum cosmology. A universal effective action algorithm for the distribution function of…
In Chain Inflation the universe tunnels along a series of false vacua of ever-decreasing energy. The main goal of this paper is to embed Chain Inflation in high energy fundamental physics. We begin by illustrating a simple effective…
We show that the bubbles $S^2\times S^2$can be created from vacuum fluctuation in certain De Sitter universe, so the space-time foam-like structure might really be constructed from bubbles of $S^2\times S^2$ in the very early inflating…
The non-Gaussian distribution of primordial perturbations has the potential to reveal the physical processes at work in the very early Universe. Local models provide a well-defined class of non-Gaussian distributions that arise naturally…
We consider the generation of primordial curvature perturbation by general non-Abelian vector fields without committing to a particular group. Self-interactions of non-Abelian fields make the field perturbation non-Gaussian. We calculate…
We consider the expected level of primordial non-Gaussianities in models in which density perturbations are produced by spatial fluctuations in the decay rate of the inflaton. We consider both the non-Gaussianities resulting from the…
We calculate the gravitational waves (GW) spectrum produced in various Early Universe scenarios from gauge field sources, thus generalizing earlier inflationary calculations to bouncing cosmologies. We consider generic couplings between the…
We perform a semi-classical analysis of the Emergent Universe scenario for inflation. Fixing the background, and taking the inflaton to be homogenous, we cast the inflaton's evolution as a one-dimensional quantum mechanics problem. We find…
Many controlled realizations of chaotic inflation employ pseudo-scalar axions. Pseudo-scalars \phi are naturally coupled to gauge fields through c \phi F \tilde{F}. In the presence of this coupling, gauge field quanta are copiously produced…
We explain how a $SU(N_c)$ gauge theory, decoupled from the standard model and with a high-lying strong coupling scale, can incorporate apparently unrelated cosmological features, such as Inflation and dark matter, using well-understood…
Eternal inflation arising from a potential landscape predicts that our universe is one realization of many possible cosmological histories. One way to access different cosmological histories is via the nucleation of bubble universes from a…
Interactions between the inflaton and any additional fields can lead to isolated bursts of particle production during inflation (for example from parametric resonance or a phase transition). Inflationary particle production leaves localized…
Assuming the existence of a scalar field which undergoes "ghost condensation" and which has a suitably chosen potential, it is possible to obtain a non-singular bouncing cosmology in the presence of regular matter and radiation. The…
We investigate the formation via tunneling of inflating (false-vacuum) bubbles in a true-vacuum background, and the reverse process. Using effective potentials from the junction condition formalism, all true- and false-vacuum bubble…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…