Related papers: Rolling Through a Vacuum
We draw attention to the possibility that inflation (i.e. accelerated expansion) might continue after the end of slow roll, during a period of fast oscillations of the inflaton field \phi . This phenomenon takes place when a mild…
Last year we argued that if slow-roll inflation followed the decay of a false vacuum in a large landscape, the steepening of the scalar potential between the inflationary plateau and the barrier generically leads to a potentially observable…
We show that Inflation in a False Vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a spectator scalar field non minimally coupled to gravity. The field is unstable in this background, it grows exponentially and slows down the pure de Sitter phase…
The spectral index of scalar perturbations is an important observable that allows us to learn about inflationary physics. In particular, a detection of a significant deviation from a constant spectral index could enable us to rule out the…
We assess two potential signals of the formation of our universe by the decay of a false vacuum. Negative spatial curvature is one possibility, but the window for its detection is now small. However, another possible signal is a suppression…
Open inflation scenario is attracting a renewed interest in the context of string landscape. Since there are a large number of metastable de Sitter vacua in string landscape, tunneling transitions to lower metastable vacua through the…
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…
If the cosmological inflationary scenario took place in the cosmic landscape in string theory, the inflaton, the scalar mode responsible for inflation, would have meandered in a complicated multi-dimensional potential. We show that this…
The previously proposed class of phenomenological inflationary models in which the assumption of inflaton slow-roll is replaced by the more general, constant-roll condition is compared with the most recent cosmological observational data,…
We study constant roll inflation systematically. This is a regime, in which the slow roll approximation can be violated. It has long been thought that this approximation is necessary for agreement with observations. However, recently it was…
Many models of high energy physics possess metastable vacua. It is conceivable that the universe can get trapped in such a false vacuum, irrespective of its origin and prior history, at an earlier stage during its evolution. The ensuing…
It is known that if the standard slow-roll inflation is followed by a power-law inflationary regime, then the trans-Planckian modes may be safely be contained in the Hubble horizon and never exit it during inflation. In this work we…
If the spatial curvature of the universe is positive, then the curvature term will always dominate at early enough times in a slow-rolling inflationary epoch. This enhances inflationary effects and hence puts limits on the possible number…
For the first time, we investigate the non-perturbative dynamics of single field inflation with a departure from slow-roll. Using simulations, we find that oscillatory features in the potential can drastically alter the course of inflation,…
There exists a growing body of observational evidence supporting a non-vanishing cosmological constant at the present epoch. We examine the possibility that such a term may arise directly from the potential energy which drove an…
We perform a general algebraic analysis on the possibility of realising slow-roll inflation in the moduli sector of string models. This problem turns out to be very closely related to the characterisation of models admitting metastable…
We revisit the status of hybrid inflation in the light of Planck and recent BICEP2 results, taking care of possible transient violations of the slow-roll conditions as the field passes from the large field to the vacuum dominated phase. The…
Recently, there has been some interest for building supersymmetric models of double inflation. These models, realistic from a particle physics point of view, predict a broken-scale-invariant power spectrum of primordial cosmological…
We argue that in the context of eternal inflation in the landscape, making predictions for cosmological -- and possibly particle physics -- observables requires a measure on the possible cosmological histories as opposed to one on the vacua…
We develop a physics-facing version of the persistence/transition-variety framework for scalar-field cosmology, tailored to inflationary dynamics. The guiding idea is that observationally viable inflationary models are often best understood…