Related papers: The Effective Planck Mass and the Scale of Inflati…
A recent paper argued that it is not possible to infer the energy scale of inflation from the amplitude of tensor fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, because the usual connection is substantially altered if there are a large…
We argue that the discrepancy between the Planck mass scale and the observed value of the cosmological constant can be largely attenuated if those quantities are understood as a result of effective, and thus scale-dependent, couplings. We…
Determining the energy scale of inflation is crucial to understand the nature of inflation in the early Universe. We place observational constraints on the energy scale of the observable part of the inflaton potential by combining the…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
In this paper, inflationary cosmology is reviewed, paying particular attention to its observational signatures associated with large-scale density perturbations generated from quantum fluctuations. In the most general scalar-tensor theories…
Accurate estimation of cosmological parameters from microwave background anisotropies requires high-accuracy understanding of the cosmological model. Normally, a power-law spectrum of density perturbations is assumed, in which case the…
There exists a growing body of observational evidence supporting a non-vanishing cosmological constant at the present epoch. We examine the possibility that such a term may arise directly from the potential energy which drove an…
We study cosmological solutions for the very early universe beginning at the Planck scale for a universe containing radiation, curvature and, as a simplification of a possible scalar field potential, a cosmological constant term. The…
For any given momentum transfer, gravitational interactions have a strength set by a characteristic scale $M_*$ inferred from amplitudes calculated in an effective theory with a strong coupling scale $M_{**}$. These are in general different…
Cosmic inflation provides a window to the highest energy densities accessible in nature, far beyond those achievable in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Theoretical insights into the inflationary era and its observational probes may…
In scale-invariant models of fundamental physics all mass scales are generated via spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this work, we study inflation in scale-invariant quadratic gravity, in which the Planck mass is generated classically by a…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
In the hope of avoiding model dependence of the cosmological observables, phenomenological parametrizations of Cosmic Inflation have recently been proposed. Typically, they are expressed in terms of two parameters associated with an…
The early Universe inflation is well known as a promising theory to explain the origin of large scale structure of the Universe, a causal theory for the origin of primordial density fluctuations which may explain the observed density…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
Because the scale of inflation is conformal frame dependent, in order to fully characterize it one should quote its value in terms of all the independent equal-time dimensionless ratios in the theory. We argue that when couplings depend on…
In the framework of inflation, scales which nowadays correspond to large scale structures were smaller than the Planck length at the beginning of inflation. Therefore, measurements of CMBR anisotropy or surveys of galaxies and of clusters…
Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…
The determination of the inflationary energy scale represents one of the first step towards the understanding of the early Universe physics. The (very mild) non-Gaussian signals that arise from any inflation model carry information about…
Understanding the behavior of the universe at large depends critically on insights about the smallest units of matter and their fundamental interactions. Inflationary cosmology is a highly successful framework for exploring these…