Related papers: BICEP's acceleration
We describe models of single-field inflation with small and sharp step features in the potential (and sound speed) of the inflaton field, in the context of the Effective Field Theory of Inflation. This approach allows us to study the…
I discuss folded inflation, an inflationary model embedded in a multi-dimensional scalar potential, such as the stringy landscape. During folded inflation, the field point evolves along a path that turns several corners in the potential.…
It is generally believed that in single-field slow-roll inflation, a large tensor-to-scalar ratio $r > 0.1$ requires inflaton field values close to or above the Planck scale. Recently, it has been claimed that $r > 0.15$ can be achieved…
[Abridged] The primordial scalar power spectrum is well constrained on large scales, primarily by the observations of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Over the last few years, it has been recognized that a sharp…
The recent Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurements indicate that there is power deficiency of the CMB anisotropies at large scales compared with the $\Lambda$CDM model. We have investigated the possibility of explaining such effects…
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…
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…
A model is developed in which the inflaton potential experiences a sudden small change in its second derivative (the effective mass of the inflaton). An exact treatment demonstrates that the resulting density perturbation has a quasi-flat…
Recent theoretical results indicate that the detection of primordial gravity waves from inflation may be a hopeless task. First, foregrounds from lensing put a strict lower limit on the detectability of the B-mode polarization signal in the…
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 tensor fraction $r\simeq 0.16$ found by BICEP2 corresponds to a Hubble parameter $H\simeq 1.0\times 10^{14}\GeV$ during inflation. This has two implications for the (single-field) slow-roll inflation hypothesis. First, the inflaton…
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 an effective 4-dimensional scalar-tensor field theory, originated from an underlying brane-bulk warped geometry, to explore the scenario of inflation. It is shown that the inflaton potential naturally emerges from the radion…
We reevaluate the predictions of inflation regarding primordial gravity waves, which should appear as B-modes in the CMB, in light of the fact that the standard inflationary paradigm is unable to account for the transition from an initially…
The effect of the initial condition of inflation on the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations is estimated assuming a slow-roll inflation model. By defining a more general initial state in inflation particular properties of the…
The BICEP experiment was designed specifically to search for the signature of inflationary gravitational waves in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Using a novel small-aperture refractor and 49 pairs of…
We discuss the possibility that we could obtain some hints of the heavy physics during inflation by analyzing local features of the primordial bispectrum. A heavy scalar field could leave large signatures in the primordial spectra through…
In this paper we break the scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum of curvature perturbations of inflation. Introducing a singular behaviour due to spontaneous symmetry breaking in the inflaton potential, we obtain fully analytic…
We extend the standard theory of cosmological perturbations to homogeneous but anisotropic universes. We present an exhaustive computation for the case of a Bianchi I model, with a residual isotropy between two spatial dimensions, which is…
We present the implications for cosmic inflation of the Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in both temperature and polarization based on the full Planck survey. The Planck full mission temperature data…