Related papers: Observing the Inflationary Reheating
Using the latest observational data, we constrain the inflationary dynamics and the subsequent reheating epoch. Predictions for both phases can be significantly improved by employing numerically computed results compared to the slow-roll…
Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contain a wealth of information about the past history of the universe and the present values of cosmological parameters. I ouline some of the theoretical advances of the last few years.…
We analyze a class of generalized inflationary models proposed in Ref. [1], known as $\beta$-exponential inflation. We show that this kind of potential can arise in the context of brane cosmology, where the field describing the size of the…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations are used to constrain reheating to Standard Model (SM) particles after a period of inflation. As a light spectator field, the SM Higgs boson acquires large field values from its quantum…
We investigate the effects of non-zero spatial curvature on cosmic inflation in the light of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from the Planck 2018 legacy release and from the 2015 observing season of BICEP2 and the…
We study the two-phase scenario following inflation, where the initial step is preheating, accompanied by a step of perturbative reheating at which inflaton field decays transferring all of its energy to create relativistic particles, the…
The BICEP2 collaboration reports a detection of primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode with a tensor-scalar ratio $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ (68% C.L.). However, this result is in tension with the recent Planck limit, $r<0.11$…
The power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from both the {\it Planck} and {\it WMAP} data exhibits a slight dip for multipoles in the range of $l= 10-30$. We show that such a dip could be the result of the resonant creation of…
In models of inflation obtained from string compactification, moduli vacuum misalignment leads to an epoch in the post-inflationary history of the universe when the energy density is dominated by cold moduli particles. This effect leads to…
I describe briefly the Cosmic Microwave Background (hereafter CMB) physics which explains why high accuracy observations of its spatial structure are a unique observational tool both for the determination of the global cosmological…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
We analyze the latest cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints on the scalar spectral index $n_s$ and tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ from Planck 2018, BICEP/Keck 2018, the Atacama Cosmology Telescope Data Release 6 (ACT DR6), and the South…
Our understanding of the state of the universe between the end of inflation and big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) is incomplete. The dynamics at the end of inflation are rich and a potential source of observational signatures. Reheating, the…
We review the currrent cosmic parameter determinations of relevance to inflation using the WMAP-1year, Boomerang, CBI, Acbar and other CMB data. The basic steps in the pipelines which determine the bandpowers from the raw data from which…
We consider string and supergravity motivated scenarios in which moduli fields dominate the energy density of the Universe in a post-inflationary epoch. For the case of a single light modulus it has been shown that considering the evolution…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors are a compelling class of inflationary models. They lead to universal predictions for large-scale observables, broadly independent from the functional form of the inflaton potential. In this work we derive…
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…
Evidence from the BICEP2 experiment for a significant gravitational-wave background has focussed attention on inflaton potentials $V(\phi) \propto \phi^\alpha$ with $\alpha=2$ ("chaotic" or "$m^2\phi^2$" inflation) or with smaller values of…
We review the constraints that the recently released Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Planck data put on inflation and we argue that single field slow-roll inflationary scenarios (with minimal kinetic term) are favored. Then, within this…
Recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations put strong constraints on the spatial curvature via estimation of the parameter $\Omega_k$ assuming an almost scale invariant primordial power spectrum. We study the evolution of the…