Related papers: Rolling Through a Vacuum
In a previous paper, two of the authors presented a "regulated" picture of eternal inflation. This picture both suggested and drew support from a conjectured discontinuity in the amplitude for tunneling from positive to negative vacuum…
Observations of the cosmic microwave background do not yet determine whether inflation was driven by a slowly-rolling scalar field or involved another physical mechanism. In this paper we discuss the prospects of using the power spectra of…
We conjecture that the inflation models with trans-Planckian excursions in the field space should be in the swampland. We check this conjecture in a few examples and investigate the constraints on the spectral index for the slow-roll…
A macroscopic universe may emerge naturally from a Planck cell fluctuation by unfolding through a stage of exponential expansion towards a homogeneous cosmological background. Such primordial inflation requires a large and presumably…
In this paper we put forward the idea that the comoving Hubble horizon undergoes multiple stages of contraction (a.k.a. inflationary phase) and expansion. The observable inflation, that produces the CMB anisotropies and generates primordial…
We consider an inflationary kinetic function with an integrable pole that is traversed during inflation. This scenario leads to enhanced spectra of primordial scalar inhomogeneities with detectable signals: formation of primordial black…
It is known that the present electroweak vacuum is likely to be metastable and it may lead to a serious instability during/after inflation. We propose a simple solution to the problem of vacuum instability during/after inflation. If there…
Recently, a novel phenomenon is observed for vacuum decay to proceed via classically allowed dynamical evolution from initial configurations of false vacuum fluctuations. With the help of some occasionally developed large fluctuations in…
It is investigated if predictions of the inflationary scenario regarding spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations generated from quantum vacuum fluctuations are robust with respect to a modification of the dispersion law for frequencies…
We examine the conditions under which a perturbative expansion around an inflating background is valid. When inflation is driven by a single field with a general sound speed, we find a lower limit on the sound speed related to the amplitude…
We describe here how the late time behavior of the decaying states, which is predicted to deviate from an exponential form, while normally of insignificant consequence, may have important cosmological implications in the case of false…
We present a model of inflation where the inflaton is accommodated as a phantom field which exhibits an initial transient pole behavior and then decays into a quintessence field which is responsible for a radiation era. We must stress that…
Primordial black holes may arise through ultra slow-roll inflation. In this work we study a toy model of ultra slow-roll inflation with a shallow dip. The ultra slow-roll stage enhances the curvature perturbations and thus the primordial…
Current measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropy power spectra of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) seem to indicate that the naive expectation for the slow-roll hierarchy within the most simple inflationary paradigm…
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…
We study the observable implications of an incomplete first order phase transition during inflation. In such a phase transition, the nucleated bubbles do not percolate and instead are continuously produced until the onset of reheating. The…
We report on a new class of fast-roll inflationary models. In a huge part of its parameter space, inflationary perturbations exhibit quite unusual phenomena such as scalar and tensor modes freezing out at widely different times, as well as…
We propose an intuitive framework for studying the problem of initial conditions in slow-roll inflation. In particular, we consider a universe at high, but sub-Planckian energy density and analyze the circumstances under which it is…
During slow-roll inflation, non-perturbative transitions can produce bubbles of metastable vacuum. These bubbles expand exponentially during inflation to super-horizon size, and later collapse into black holes when the expansion of the…
Inflation may provide unique insight into the physics at the highest available energy scales that cannot be replicated in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Features in the primordial power spectrum are generically predicted in a wide…