Related papers: The expected anisotropy in solid inflation
We derive general analytic formulae for the power spectrum and spectral index of the curvature perturbation produced during inflation driven by a multi-component inflaton field, up to the second order in the slow-roll approximation. We do…
We calculate the scalar gravitational and matter perturbations in the context of slow-roll inflation with multiple scalar fields, that take values on a (curved) manifold, to first order in slow roll. For that purpose a basis for these…
Cosmological inflation models with modifications to include recent cosmological observations has been an active area of research after WMAP 3 results, which have given us information about the composition of dark matter, normal matter and…
Modular inflation is the restriction to two fields of automorphic inflation, a general group based framework for multifield scalar field theories with curved target spaces, which can be parametrized by the comoving curvature perturbation…
In multi-field inflation one or more non-adiabatic modes may become light, potentially inducing large levels of isocurvature perturbations in the cosmic microwave background. If in addition these light modes are coupled to the adiabatic…
We carry out numerical investigations of the dynamics and perturbations in the Nflation model of Dimopoulos et al. (2005). This model features large numbers of scalar fields with different masses, which can cooperate to drive inflation…
A scenario with two subsequent periods of inflationary expansion in the very early universe is examined. The model is based on a potential motivated by symmetries being found in field theory at high energy. For various parameter sets of the…
How much does the curvature perturbation change after it leaves the horizon, and when should one evaluate the power spectrum? To answer these questions we study single field inflation models numerically, and compare the evolution of…
Models of axion inflation are particularly interesting since they provide a natural justification for the flatness of the potential over a super-Planckian distance, namely the approximate shift-symmetry of the inflaton. In addition, most of…
Anomalies in recent observational data indicate that there might be some "anisotropic hair" generated in an inflation period. To obtain general information about the effects of this anisotropic hair to inflation models, we studied…
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…
Inflation is an early period of accelerated cosmic expansion, thought to be sourced by high energy physics. A key task today is to use the influx of increasingly precise observational data to constrain the plethora of inflationary models…
We revisit the issue on signatures of pre-inflationary background anisotropy by considering the quantization of a massless and minimally coupled scalar field in an axially symmetric Kasner background, mimicking cosmological perturbations.…
We propose a new class of natural inflation models based on a hidden scale invariance. In a very generic Wilsonian effective field theory with an arbitrary number of scalar fields, which exhibits scale invariance via the dilaton, the…
Distortions of the Cosmic Microwave Background energy spectrum of the $\mu$ type are sensitive to the primordial power spectrum through the dissipation of curvature perturbations on scales $k\simeq 50$ - $10^4\,\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$. Their…
In this short review, the predictions of inflation are presented and compared to the most recent measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy. It is argued that inflation is compatible with these observations but that…
The next generation of cosmological observations will be sensitive to small deviations from a pure power law in the primordial power spectrum of the curvature perturbations. In the context of slow-roll inflation, these deviations are…
We discuss the damping of tensor modes due to anisotropic stress in inflation. The effect is negligible in standard inflation and may be significantly large in inflation models that involve drastic production of free-streaming particles.
The conventional slow-roll approximation is broken in the so-called "ultra slow-roll" models of inflation, for which the inflaton potential is exactly (or extremely) flat. The interesting nature of (canonical) ultra slow-roll inflation is…
In this paper we will discuss analytically the perturbations created from a slowly rolling subdominant spectator field which decays much before the end of inflation. The quantum fluctuations of such a spectator field can seed perturbations…