Related papers: Power Suppression at Large Scales in String Inflat…
Prior to recombination, Silk damping causes the dissipation of energy from acoustic waves into the monopole of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), resulting in spectral distortions. These can be used to probe the primordial scalar power…
We study the possibility of extended inflation in the effective theory of gravity from strings compactified to four dimensions and find that it strongly depends on the mechanism of supersymmetry breaking. We consider a general class of…
In the context of two-field inflation characterized by a light direction and a heavy direction, we revisit the question of the impact of the massive modes on the power spectrum produced after a turn in the inflationary trajectory. We…
In low-energy effective string theory, $\alpha'$ corrections involve the coupling of the dilaton field to Gauss-Bonnet term. We assume that the dilaton potential is fine tuned so that the dilaton field may oscillate rapidly for a while…
The spectrum of primordial fluctuations from inflation can be obtained using a mathematically controlled, and systematically extendable, uniform approximation. Closed-form expressions for power spectra and spectral indices may be found…
We employ the formalism of the effective field theory of inflation to study the effects of a sudden change in the speed of sound of the inflationary perturbations. Such an event generates a feature with high frequency oscillations both in…
We revisit the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints on the spatial curvature of the Universe, assessing how they change when the curvature parameter and the primordial inflationary scalar spectrum are treated consistently within…
We study the generation of a large power spectrum, necessary for primordial black hole formation, within the effective theory of single-field inflation. The mechanisms we consider include a transition into a ghost-inflation-like phase and…
We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of non-critical string theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production in the…
The "central" region of moduli space of M- and string theories is where the string coupling is about unity and the volume of compact dimensions is about the string volume. Here we argue that in this region the non-perturbative potential…
We present a study of open inflation cosmological scenarios in which cosmic strings form betwen the two inflationary epochs. It is shown that in these models strings are stretched outside the horizon due to the inflationary expansion but…
In the inflationary scenarios suggested by string theory, the vacuum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field can be amplified by the time-evolution of the dilaton background, and can grow large enough to explain both the origin of the…
Inflationary string cosmology backgrounds can amplify perturbations in a more efficient way than conventional inflationary backgrounds, because the perturbation amplitude may grow - instead of being constant - outside the horizon. If not…
A cosmic string network created during an inflationary stage in the early Universe - here defined as i-string network - is expected to enter a transient stretching regime during inflation, in which its characteristic length is stretched to…
We present a minimal model for the Universe evolution fully extracted from effective String Theory. This model is by its construction close to the standard cosmological evolution, and it is driven selfconsistently by the evolution of the…
The inflaton field responsible for inflation may not be a canonical fundamental scalar. It is possible that the inflaton is a composite of fermions or it may have a decay width. In these cases the standard procedure for calculating the…
Inflationary models whose vacuum energy arises from a D-term are believed not to suffer from the supergravity eta problem of F-term inflation. That is, D-term models have the desirable property that the inflaton mass can naturally remain…
Ultra-light axions ($m_a\lesssim 10^{-18}$eV), motivated by string theory, can be a powerful probe of the energy scale of inflation. In contrast to heavier axions the isocurvature modes in the ultra-light axions can coexist with observable…
The discovery of the string theory landscape has recently brought attention to the eternal nature of inflation. In contrast to the common belief that eternal inflation may be a generic feature of most inflationary models, in this note we…
The main problem of inflation in string theory is finding the models with a flat potential, consistent with stabilization of the volume of the compactified space. This can be achieved in the theories where the potential has (an approximate)…