Related papers: Signs of Analyticity in Single-Field Inflation
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…
Non-Gaussianities of the primordial density perturbations have emerged as a very powerful possible signal to test the dynamics that drove the period of inflation. While in general the most sensitive observable is the three-point function in…
Scattering amplitudes at weak coupling are highly constrained by Lorentz invariance, locality and unitarity, and depend on model details only through coupling constants and particle content. In this paper, we develop an understanding of…
Sum rules connecting low-energy observables to high-energy physics are an interesting way to probe the mechanism of inflation and its ultraviolet origin. Unfortunately, such sum rules have proven difficult to study in a cosmological…
We study a class of minimally coupled scalar field theories which leads to analytic solutions for the Hubble rate and the scalar field, where the scalar field obeys a generalized tracking law $\dot{\phi}^2\sim H^{-m}$. The inflationary…
We investigate models in which inflation is driven by an ultraviolet safe and interacting scalar sector stemming from a new class of nonsupersymmetric gauge field theories. These new theories, differently from generic scalar models, are…
We revisit perturbative unitarity in scalar field inflation with a nonminimal coupling, with Higgs inflation serving as the most prominent example. Although such models are phenomenologically successful, it is critical to examine whether or…
The primordial power spectrum informs the possible inflationary histories of our universe. Given a power spectrum, the ensuing cosmic microwave background is calculated and compared to the observed one. Thus, one focus of modern cosmology…
We investigate the non-Gaussianities of inflation driven by a single scalar field coupling non-minimally to the Einstein Gravity. We assume that the form of the scalar field is very general with an arbitrary sound speed. For convenience to…
We study non-Gaussianities in the primordial perturbations in single field inflation where there is radiation era prior to inflation. Inflation takes place when the energy density of radiation drops below the value of the potential of a…
We generalize the single-field consistency relations to capture not only the leading term in the squeezed limit---going as 1/q^3, where q is the small wavevector---but also the subleading one, going as 1/q^2. This term, for an (n+1)-point…
We examine the effective theory of single-field inflation in the limit where the scalar perturbations propagate with a small speed of sound. In this case the non-linearly realized time-translation symmetry of the Lagrangian implies large…
We study the generation of local non-Gaussianity in models of canonical single field inflation when their backgrounds are either attractor or non-attractor. We show that the invariance of inflation under space-time diffeomorphisms can be…
Most of the inflationary models that are in agreement with the Planck data rely on the presence of non-renormalizable operators. If the connection to low energy particle physics is made, the renormalization group (RG) introduces a…
Positivity bounds represent nontrivial limitations on effective field theories (EFTs) if those EFTs are to be completed into a Lorentz-invariant, causal, local, and unitary framework. While such positivity bounds have been applied in a wide…
As is well known, the non-Gaussianity parameter $f_{_{\rm NL}}$, which is often used to characterize the amplitude of the scalar bi-spectrum, can be expressed completely in terms of the scalar spectral index $n_{\rm s}$ in the squeezed…
For simple inflationary models, we provide a consistent and complete scheme by which the macro-physical details of early universe inflation may be determined explicitly from the underlying micro-physical theory. We examine inflationary…
We compute the amplitude of the non-Gaussianities in inflationary models with multiple, uncoupled scalar fields. This calculation thus applies to all models of assisted inflation, including N-flation, where inflation is driven by multiple…
Non-linear interactions during inflation generate non-Gaussianities in the distribution of primordial curvature. In many theories, the physics is scale-invariant, such that the induced three-point function depends solely on a dimensionless…
Models of inflation where the entropic directions have large and negative masses $|m_s| \gg H$ can be well described by a single-field EFT with an imaginary sound speed $c_s$. Among other features, they predict an exponential enhancement of…