Related papers: Super-Planckian excursions of the inflaton and qua…
A corpuscular quantum description of inflation shows that there is no fundamental problem with trans-Planckian excursions of the inflaton field up to about 100 Planck masses, with the upper bound coming from the corpuscular quantum effects.…
The recent detection by the BICEP2 collaboration of a high level of tensor modes has relevant implications which we briefly discuss in this short note. In particular, the large angle CMB B- mode polarisation seems to imply problematic…
Extensions of the Standard Model and general relativity featuring a UV fixed point can leave observable implications at accessible energies. Although mass parameters such as the Planck scale can appear through dimensional transmutation, all…
In the present paper we discuss how trans-Planckian physics affects inflationary vacuum fluctuations and primordial density perturbations. The trans-Planckian problem during inflation has been widely discussed in literature, but it is still…
In this paper we will analyse the constraints on a sub-Planckian excursion of a single inflaton field, which would yield a large tensor to scalar ratio, while explaining the temperature anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
One of the greatest problems of primordial inflation is that the inflationary space-time is past-incomplete. This is mainly because Einstein's GR suffers from a space-like Big Bang singularity. It has recently been shown that ghost-free,…
Higher-order theories of gravity are extensions to general relativity (GR) motivated mainly by high-energy physics searching for GR ultraviolet completeness. They are characterized by the inclusion of correction terms in the…
We summarize the utility of precise cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements as probes of the physics of inflation. We focus on the prospects for using CMB measurements to differentiate various inflationary mechanisms. In…
We provide a detailed study of natural inflation with a periodic non-minimal coupling, which is a well-motivated inflationary model that admits an explicit UV completion. We demonstrate that this construction can satisfy the most recent…
Supergravity provides the natural supersymmetric framework for early universe cosmology. A broad class of inflationary models in no-scale supergravity yields tree-level predictions for cosmic microwave background (CMB) observables that…
A detection of primordial B-modes has been heralded not only as a smoking gun for the existence of inflation, but also as a way to establish the scale at which inflation took place. In this paper we critically reinvestigate the connection…
It has recently been suggested that Planck scale physics may effect the evolution of cosmological fluctuations in the early stages of cosmological inflation in a non-trivial way, leading to an excited state for modes whose wavelength is…
Towards a classification of UV completable Higgs inflation in the framework of parity-even metric-affine gravity, we investigate the particle spectrum of a deformed theory in the large-$N$ limit. In a simple Higgs inflation model in…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…
This chapter describes how the Cosmic Gravitational Wave Background induces a specific type of CMB polarization and describes the first experiment dedicated to testing this most-promising signature of inflation. This experiment, the…
We consider the UV-protected inflation, where the inflaton potential is obtained by quantum (one-loop) breaking of a global symmetry into a discrete symmetry. In this model, all coupling scales are sub-Planckian. This is achieved by…
Recent detection of $B$-mode polarization induced from tensor perturbations by the BICEP2 experiment implies so-called large field inflation, where an inflaton field takes super-Planckian expectation value during inflation, at a high energy…
If the recent measurement of B-mode polarization by BICEP2 is due to primordial gravitational waves, it implies that inflation was driven by energy densities at the GUT scale $M_{GUT} \sim 2\times 10^{16} GeV$. This favors single-field…
We investigate the pre-inflationary dynamics of inflation with the Starobinsky potential, favored by recent data from the Planck mission, using techniques developed to study cosmological perturbations on quantum spacetimes in the framework…