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In an alternative mechanism recently proposed, adiabatic cosmological perturbations are generated at the decay of the inflaton field due to small fluctuations of its coupling to matter. This happens whenever the coupling is governed by the…
Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…
We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary…
The impact of particle production during inflation on the primordial curvature perturbation spectrum is investigated both analytically and numerically. We obtain an oscillatory behavior on small scales, while on large scales the spectrum is…
At energies higher than the brane tension, the dynamics of a scalar field rolling down a potential are modified relative to the predictions of General Relativity. The modifications imply, among other things, that steeper potentials can be…
We develop a possibility of generating tensor non-Gaussianity in a kind of anisotropic inflation, where a $U(1)$ gauge field is kinetically coupled to a spectator scalar field. Owing to this coupling, the coherent mode of the electric field…
Isocurvature perturbations naturally occur in models of inflation consisting of more than one scalar field. In this paper we calculate the spectrum of isocurvature perturbations generated at the end of inflation for three different…
We explore a new possibility that some inflaton fields in multi-field inflation models satisfy the observed value of the spectral index so that the curvature perturbation generated by them through post-inflationary dynamics may be relevant…
We argue that double inflation may occur when a spectator field is non-minimally coupled to gravity. As a concrete example, we study a two-field inflationary model where the initial spectator field is non-minimally coupled to gravity while…
We investigate density perturbations in the chain inflation scenario, where the inflaton undergoes successive tunneling transitions along one field direction. First we show that when the bubble walls associated with such a phase transition…
The calculation of scalar gravitational and matter perturbations during multiple-field inflation valid to first order in slow roll is discussed. These fields may be the coordinates of a non-trivial field manifold and hence have non-minimal…
The apparent alignment of the cosmic microwave background multipoles on large scales challenges the standard cosmological model. Scalar field inflation is isotropic and cannot account for the observed alignment. We explore the imprints, a…
Measurements of CMB temperature fluctuations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) indicate that the fluctuation amplitude in one half of the sky differs from the amplitude in the other half. We show that such an asymmetry…
The recent Planck results and future releases on the horizon present a key opportunity to address a fundamental question in inflationary cosmology of whether primordial density perturbations have a quantum or thermal origin, i.e. whether…
The observed CMBR dipole is generally interpreted as the consequence of the peculiar motion of the Sun with respect to the reference frame of the CMBR. This article proposes an alternative interpretation in which the observed dipole is the…
Multi-field inflation models include a variety of scenarios for how inflation proceeds and ends. Models with the same potential but different kinetic terms are common in the literature. We compare spiral inflation and Dante's inferno-type…
In most inflationary models, space-time inflated to the extent that modes of cosmological size originated as modes of wavelengths at least several orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length. Recent studies confirmed that, therefore,…
The observed CMBR dipole, generally interpreted as the consequence of the peculiar motion of the Sun with respect to the reference frame of the CMBR, can also be explained by the presence of ultra large scale (of the order of $100H_0^{-1}$)…
We review the prospects for detecting tensor modes generated during inflation by CMB polarization experiments and by searching for a stochastic gravitational wave background with laser interferometers in space. We tackle the following two…
Recent Planck measurements show some CMB anomalies on large angular scales, which confirms the early observations by WMAP. We show that an inflationary model, in which before the slow-roll inflation the Universe is in a superinflationary…