Related papers: A Smooth Landscape: Ending Saddle Point Inflation …
We point out the existing confusions about the slowroll parameters and conditions for multifield inflation. If one requires the fields to roll down the gradient flow, we find that only articles adopting the Hubble slowroll expansion are on…
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 study some aspects of fine tuning in inflationary scenarios within string theory flux compactifications and, in particular, in models of accidental inflation. We investigate the possibility that the apparent fine-tuning of the low energy…
In this work we study slow-roll inflation for a vector-tensor model with massive vector fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. The model under consideration has arbitrary parameters for each geometrical coupling. Taking into account a…
An anthropic understanding of the cosmological constant requires that the vacuum energy at late time scans from one patch of the universe to another. If the vacuum energy during inflation also scans, the various patches of the universe…
We revisit models of natural inflation and show that the single-field effective theory described by the potential $V(a)\sim \cos\frac{a}{f}$ breaks down as the inflaton $a$ makes large-field excursions, even for values of $f$ smaller than…
We present a new mechanism for slow-roll inflation based on higher dimensional supersymmetric gauge theory compactified to four dimensions with twisted (supersymmetry breaking) boundary conditions. These boundary conditions lead to a…
We show that a moduli space of the form predicted by string theory, lifted by supersymmetry breaking, gives rise to successful inflation for large regions of parameter space without any modification or fine tuning. This natural realization…
In this note we point out that, contrary to the standard point of view, slow roll inflation is due to high gravitational friction. We show that the requirement of slow roll coincides with the requirement of a flat scalar field potential in…
Following Freivogel {\it et al} we consider inflation in a predictive (or `friendly') region of the landscape of string vacua, as modeled by Arkani-Hamed, Dimopoulos and Kachru. In such a region the dimensionful coefficients of…
Inflation is the currently accepted paradigm for the beginnings of the Universe. To explain the observed almost scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations with only a slight spectral tilt, inflation must have been "slow roll", that…
The usual description of inflationary fluctuations uses the framework of quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, in which quantum fluctuations are superimposed on a classical background spacetime. Even for large fluctuations, such…
An appealing feature of inflationary cosmology is the presence of a phase-space attractor, "slow roll", which washes out the dependence on initial field velocities. We investigate the robustness of this property under backreaction from…
In this work, we investigate how a smooth transition from a constant-roll to a slow-roll inflationary era may be realized, in the context of a canonical scalar field theory. We study in some detail the dynamical evolution of the…
We show that initial conditions for small-field inflation can be determined quantum mechanically by introducing a suitable flattened region in the scalar potential. The inflaton is then driven towards the slow-roll attractor solution…
A wide variety of vacua, and their cosmological realization, may provide an explanation for the apparently anthropic choices of some parameters of particle physics and cosmology. If the probability on various parameters is weighted by…
Slow-roll inflation requires the inflaton field to have an exceptionally flat potential, which combined with measurements of the scale of inflation demands some degree of fine-tuning. Alternatively, the flatness of the potential could be…
Inflation is often described through the dynamics of a scalar field, slow-rolling in a suitable potential. Ultimately, this inflaton must be identified as the expectation value of a quantum field, evolving in a quantum effective potential.…
We study the effective field theory of inflation, i.e. the most general theory describing the fluctuations around a quasi de Sitter background, in the case of single field models. The scalar mode can be eaten by the metric by going to…
We explore the inflationary phase of a scalar field with a kinetic term non-minimally coupled to gravity. We find that one of the slow-roll conditions is naturally consequence of the equation of motion of the scalar field. Thus, slow-roll…