Related papers: Power Suppression at Large Scales in String Inflat…
Attempts at building an unified description of the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions usually involve several stages of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We consider the effects of such symmetry breaking during an era of primordial…
The pre-big-bang cosmology inspired by superstring theories has been suggested as an alternative to slow-roll inflation. We analyze, in both the Jordan and Einstein frames, the effect of spatial curvature on this scenario and show that too…
Inflation generally assumes a field with nonzero potential that leads to inflationary expansion happening at arbitrarily early times. We demonstrate potentially observable consequences of inflation with a finite initial time in a model in…
We consider a phenomenological model of inflation where the inflaton is the phase of a complex scalar field $\Phi$. Planck-suppressed operators of $\mathcal O(f^5/M_\mathrm{pl})$ modify the geometry of the vev $\langle \Phi \rangle$ at…
We study the asymmetric primordial fluctuations in a model of inflation in which translational invariance is broken by a domain wall. We calculate the corrections to the power spectrum of curvature perturbations; they are anisotropic and…
We investigate the possibility that a heavy scalar field, whose mass exceeds the Hubble scale during inflation, could leave non-negligible signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy power spectrum through the…
We propose a stringy version of the old inflation scenario which does not require any slow-roll inflaton potential and is based on a specific example of string compatification with warped metric. Our set-up admits the presence of…
In cosmological scenarios with thermal inflation, extra eras of moduli matter domination, thermal inflation and flaton matter domination exist between primordial inflation and the radiation domination of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. During…
We study the phenomenological constraints on a recently proposed model of open inflation in the context of induced gravity. The main interest of this model is the relatively small number of parameters, which may be constrained by many…
The small-scale crisis, discrepancies between observations and N-body simulations, may imply suppressed matter fluctuations on subgalactic distance scales. Such a suppression could be caused by some early-universe mechanism (e.g., broken…
String models can produce successful inflationary scenarios in the context of brane collisions and in many of these models cosmic strings may also be produced. In scenarios such as KKLMMT the string contribution is naturally predicted to be…
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…
We examine the spectrum of inflaton fluctuations resulting from any given long period of exponential inflation. Infrared and ultraviolet divergences in the inflaton dispersion summed over all modes do not appear in our approach. We show how…
We investigate inflationary models leading to density perturbations with a spectral index $n>1$ (``blue spectra"). These perturbation spectra may be useful to simultaneously account for both the amount of ultra large-scale power required to…
We construct a multi-field inflationary model consisting of multiple K\"ahler moduli derived from type IIB string compactification in the large volume limit. The model consists of both heavy and light fields, with the former being frozen…
In Chain Inflation the universe tunnels along a series of false vacua of ever-decreasing energy. The main goal of this paper is to embed Chain Inflation in high energy fundamental physics. We begin by illustrating a simple effective…
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
Brief periods of non-slow-roll evolution during inflation can produce interesting observable consequences, as primordial black holes, or an inflationary gravitational wave spectrum enhanced at small scales. We develop a model independent,…
We show that if inflation lasted just longer than the required 60 or so e-folds $N$ both scalar and tensor contributions to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) power spectra are expected to show a cut-off. However the behaviour of the…