Related papers: Planck, LHC, and $\alpha$-attractors
Cosmic inflation is the cornerstone of modern cosmology. In particular, following the Planck mission reports presented in 2015 regarding cosmic microwave background (CMB), there is an increasing interest in searching for inflaton candidates…
We study cosmology in scalar-tensor (Bergmann Wagoner) gravity, restricting the coupling function, ${\omega}({\phi})$ to be constant. Rather than specify the form of the cosmological function, ${\lambda}({\phi})$, the scalar field is…
The supergravity (SUGRA) theories with exact global $U(1)$ symmetry or shift symmetry in K\"ahler potential provide the natural frameworks for inflation. However, the quadratic inflation is disfavoured by the new results on primordial…
We consider a physically viable cosmological model that has a field dependent Gauss-Bonnet coupling in its effective action, in addition to a standard scalar field potential. The presence of such terms in the four dimensional effective…
We construct inflationary models in the context of supergravity with orthogonal nilpotent superfields [1]. When local supersymmetry is gauge-fixed in the unitary gauge, these models describe theories with only a single real scalar (the…
Cosmological constraints on the scalar-tensor theory of gravity by analyzing the angular power spectrum data of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) obtained from the Planck 2015 results are presented. We consider the harmonic attractor…
We consider the effective evolution of a phenomenological model from FLRW supersymmetric quantum cosmology with a scalar field. The scalar field acts as a clock and inflaton. We examine a family of simple superpotentials that produce an…
Inflation with a scalar-field potential of the form \lambda (\phi^2-v^2)^2 can be described in terms of a parametrical attractor with critical points, whose driftage depends on the control value of the slowly changing Hubble rate. The…
Modern data is showing increasing evidence that the Universe is accelerating. So far, all attempts to account for the acceleration have required some fundamental dimensionless quantities to be extremely small. We show how a class of scalar…
In the present paper, we perform a sub-Planckian quantum mode analysis of linear cosmological perturbation in the inflaton field over a classical quasi de-Siter metric background by dynamical horizon exit (DHE) method. In this way, we probe…
A weakly coupled scalar field $\Phi$ with a simple exponential potential $V=M_P^4\exp(-\lambda\Phi/M_P)$ where $M_P$ is the reduced Planck mass, and $\lambda > 2$, has an attractor solution in a radiation or matter dominated universe in…
Quantum fluctuations of scalar fields during inflation could determine the very large-scale structure of the universe. In the case of general scalar-tensor gravity theories these fluctuations lead to the diffusion of fundamental constants…
The holographic space-time approach to inflation provides a well defined and self-contained framework to study the early universe. Based on a quasi-local quantum gravity theory generalizing string theory beyond AdS backgrounds, it addresses…
Possibly, the most general action in the background of isotropic and homogeneous space-time has been considered to study the quantum evolution of the early universe, apart from a cosmological constant. The hermiticity of the effective…
We analyze cosmological perturbations to the linear order in the context of inflation with an arbitrary number of scalar fields. The fields take values on a non-trivial manifold with a positive-definite metric and are non-minimally coupled…
The latest released data from Planck in 2018, put up tighter constraints on inflationary parameters. In the present article, the in-built symmetry of the non-minimally coupled scalar-tensor theory of gravity is used to fix the coupling…
We demonstrate that there are theories that exhibit spontaneous scalarization in the strong gravity regime while having General Relativity with a constant scalar as a cosmological attractor. We identify the minimal model that has this…
We describe the coupling of matter fields to an inflationary sector of supergravity, the inflaton $\Phi$ and a stabilizer $S$, in models where the Kahler potential has a flat inflaton direction. Such models include, in particular, advanced…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
In these two lectures I will discuss some outstanding problems in the standard model of cosmology, concentrating on the physics that might be related to the title of this school, ``Searching for the totally unexpected in the LHC era.'' In…