Related papers: Rolling Through a Vacuum
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…
In order to calculate the power spectrum generated during a stage of inflation, we have to specify the quantum state of the inflaton perturbations, which is conventionally assumed to be the Bunch-Davies vacuum. We argue that this choice is…
We study the effects of the non-attractor initial conditions for the canonical single-field inflation. The non-attractor stage can last only several $e$-folding numbers, and should be followed by hilltop inflation. This two-stage evolution…
Chain Inflation is an alternative to slow roll inflation in which the universe undergoes a series of transitions between different vacua. The density perturbations (studied in this paper) are seeded by the probabilistic nature of tunneling…
We develop our recent suggestion that inflation may be made past eternal, so that there is no initial cosmological singularity or "beginning of time". Inflation with multiple vacua generically approaches a steady-state statistical…
We summarize our work on constant roll inflationary models. It was understood recently that constant roll inflation, in a regime beyond the slow roll approximation, can give models that are in agreement with the observational constraints.…
We study late-time acceleration scenarios using a quintessence field initially trapped in a metastable false vacuum state. The false vacuum has non-zero vacuum energy and could drive exponential expansion if not coupled with gravity. Upon…
In order to solve the fine-tuning problem of the cosmological constant, we propose a simple model with the vacuum energy non-minimally coupled to the inflaton field. In this model, the vacuum energy decays to the inflaton during…
In this paper we consider inflation as a probe of new physics near the string or Planck scale. We discuss how new physics can be captured by the choice of vacuum, and how this leads to modifications of the primordial spectrum as well as the…
We study the problem of initial conditions for slow-roll inflation along a plateau-like scalar potential within the framework of fluctuation-dissipation dynamics. We consider, in particular, that inflation was preceded by a…
We study the realization of cosmic inflation in bigravity theories. By analyzing the evolution of scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations in de Sitter-like spacetimes, we find strong stability constraints on the class of viable vacua…
It is usually supposed that inflation is of the slow-roll variety, and that the inflaton generates the primordial curvature perturbation. According to the curvaton hypothesis, inflation need not be slow-roll, and if it is the inflaton…
Because the inflationary mechanism is extremely sensitive to UV-physics, the construction of theoretically robust models of inflation provides a unique window on Planck-scale physics. We review efforts to use an axion with a shift symmetry…
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…
Quasi-conformal models are an appealing scenario that can offer naturally a strongly supercooled phase transition and a period of thermal inflation in the early Universe. A crucial aspect for the viability of these models is how the…
Hybrid inflation faces two well-known problems: the blue spectrum of the non-supersymmetric version of the model and the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the fields leading to sufficient inflation to account for the standard…
We investigate if the observed small and nearly scale-invariant primordial cosmic perturbation, i.e. the perturbation amplitude $P_\zeta\sim10^{-9}$ and the spectral index $n_s \simeq 0.965$, is typical in the landscape of vacua after…
If we posit the validity of the consistency relations, the tensor spectral index and the relative amplitude of the scalar and tensor power spectra are both fixed by a single slow roll parameter. The physics of the protoinflationary…
We study the implications of the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for early universe cosmology and in particular inflationary cosmology. The TCC leads to the conclusion that if we want inflationary cosmology to…
We study Coleman-De Luccia tunneling of the Standard Model Higgs field during inflation in the case when the electroweak vacuum is metastable. We verify that the tunneling rate is exponentially suppressed. The main contribution to the…