Related papers: Inflating with Large Effective Fields
We obtain the non-equilibrium effective action of an inflaton like scalar field --the system-- by tracing over sub Hubble degrees of freedom of "environmental" light scalar fields. The effective action is stochastic leading to effective…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
In Aligned Natural Inflation, an alignment between different potential terms produces an inflaton excursion greater than the axion scales in the potential. We show that, starting from a general potential of two axions with two aligned…
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 explore some issues in slow roll inflation in situations where field excursions are small compared to $M_p$. We argue that for small field inflation, minimizing fine tuning requires low energy supersymmetry and a tightly constrained…
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…
We study the effects of primordial magnetic fields on the inflationary potential in the context of a warm inflation scenario. The model, based on global supersymmetry with a new-inflation-type potential and a coupling between the inflaton…
Inflation can be supported in very steep potentials if it is generated by rapidly turning fields, which can be natural in negatively curved field spaces. The curvature perturbation, $\zeta$, of these models undergoes an exponential,…
Using numerical solutions of the full Einstein field equations coupled to a scalar inflaton field in 3+1 dimensions, we study the conditions under which a universe that is initially expanding, highly inhomogeneous and dominated by gradient…
We consider the torsional completion of gravity with spinor and scalar fields: we show how in this environment conditions of extreme symmetry or specific approximations imply the scalar field to be constant, so that slow-roll takes place…
During inflation, the geometry of spacetime is described by a (quasi-)de Sitter phase. Inflationary observables are determined by the underlying (softly broken) de Sitter isometry group SO(1, 4) which acts like a conformal group on R^3:…
Precise cosmological data from WMAP and forthcoming CMB experiments motivate the study of the quantum corrections to the slowroll inflationary parameters.We find the quantum (loop) corrections to the equations of motion of the classical…
In this paper, we present quantitative constraints on the scalar field potential for a general class of inflationary models. (1) We first consider the reconstruction of the inflationary potential for given primordial density fluctuation…
During inflation, massive fields can contribute to the power spectrum of curvature perturbation via a dimension-5 operator. This contribution can be considered as a bias for the program of using $n_s$ and $r$ to select inflation models.…
We explore the dynamics and observational predictions of the Warm Little Inflaton scenario, presently the simplest realization of warm inflation within a concrete quantum field theory construction. We consider three distinct types of scalar…
The evolution of high order correlation functions of a test scalar field in arbitrary inflationary backgrounds is computed. Whenever possible, exact results are derived from quantum field theory calculations. Taking advantage of the fact…
In this work, we investigate the post-inflationary dynamics of a simple single-field model with a renormalizable inflaton potential featuring a near-inflection point at a field value $\phi_0$. Due to the concave shape of the scalar…
In effective supergravity theories following from the superstring, a modulus field can quite naturally set the neccessary initial conditions for successful cosmological inflation to be driven by a hidden sector scalar field. The leading…
We revisit inflation with non-canonical scalar fields by applying deformed-steepness exponential potentials. We show that the resulting scenario can lead to inflationary observables, and in particular to scalar spectral index and…
The combined Planck, BICEP/Keck Array and BAO measurements of the scalar spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio from the cosmic microwave background observations severely constrain or completely rule out several models of…