Related papers: Inflation and the Higgs Scalar
The Higgs field of the pure Standard Model can lead to the inflationary expansion of the early Universe if it is non-minimally coupled to gravity. The model predicts Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) parameters in perfect agreement with the…
We investigate the possibility of using the only known fundamental scalar, the Higgs, as an inflaton with minimal coupling to gravity. The peculiar appearance of a plateau or a false vacuum in the renormalised effective scalar potential…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
Inflation is a bold and expansive extension of the Standard Cosmology. It holds the promise to extend our understanding of the Universe to within 10^{-32}sec of the big bang and answer most of the pressing questions in cosmology. Its…
The inflationary paradigm provides a robust description of the peculiar initial conditions which are required for the success of the Hot Big Bang model of cosmology, as well as of the recent precision measurements of temperature…
We investigate the role of the Higgs field as a fundamental scalar in the Standard Model within the framework of modular inflation models, where a modulus field acts as the inflaton and its interactions are governed by an underlying modular…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
The properties of the recently discovered Higgs boson together with the absence of new physics at collider experiments allows us to speculate about consistently extending the Standard Model of particle physics all the way up to the Planck…
Motivated by the gauge theory of gravity with local scaling symmetry proposed recently in 1712.04537 and 1506.01807, we investigate whether the scalar field therein can be responsible for the inflation. We show that the classical theory…
Inflationary cosmology represents a well-studied framework to describe the expansion of space in the early universe, as it explains the origin of the large-scale structure of the cosmos and the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background…
We consider models of chaotic inflation driven by the real parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields involved in the spontaneous breaking of a grand unification symmetry at a scale assuming its supersymmetric value. Employing quadratic…
We study Higgs inflation in the context of generalized G-inflation, i.e. the most general single-field inflation model with second-order field equations. The four variants of Higgs inflation proposed so far in the literature can be…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
Discovered almost forty years ago, inflation has become the leading paradigm for the early universe. Originally invented to avoid the fine-tuning puzzles of the standard model of cosmology, the so-called hot Big Bang phase, inflation has…
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…