Related papers: Can observations look back to the beginning of inf…
Inflation is a highly favoured theory for the early Universe. It is compatible with current observations of the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure and is a driver in the quest to detect primordial gravitational waves. It…
In scenarios of physical interest in Loop Quantum Cosmology, with a preinflationary epoch where the kinetic energy of the inflaton dominates, the analytic study of the dynamics of the primordial fluctuations has been carried out by…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
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…
With an energy scale that can be as high as $10^{14}\,{\rm GeV}$, inflation may provide a unique probe of high-energy physics. Both scalar and tensor fluctuations generated during this early accelerated expansion contain crucial information…
The new three year WMAP data seem to confirm the presence of non-standard large scale features in the Cosmic Microwave Anisotropies power spectrum. While these features may hint at uncorrected experimental systematics, it is also possible…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
We propose a model for early universe cosmology without the need for fundamental scalar fields. Cosmic acceleration and phenomenologically viable reheating of the universe results from a series of energy transitions, where during each…
The decoherence of quantum fluctuations into classical perturbations during inflation is discussed. A simple quantum mechanical argument, using a spatial particle wavefunction rather than a field description, shows that observable…
It is often argued that inflation erases all the information about what took place before it started. Quantum gravity, relevant in the Planck era, seems therefore mostly impossible to probe with cosmological observations. In general, only…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
We compute the spectrum of cosmological perturbations in a scenario in which inflation is driven by radiation in a non-commutative space-time. In this scenario, the non-commutativity of space and time leads to a modified dispersion relation…
Using numerical solutions of the full Einstein field equations coupled to a scalar inflaton field in 3+1 dimensions, we study the conditions under which a universe that is initially expanding, highly inhomogeneous and dominated by gradient…
We show that deviations of the quantum state of the inflaton from the thermal vacuum of inflation may leave an imprint in the CMB anisotropies. The quantum dynamics of the inflaton in such a state produces corrections to the inflationary…
The reheating phase after inflation is one of the least observationally constrained epochs in the evolution of the Universe. The forthcoming gravitational wave observatories will enable us to constrain at least some of the non-standard…
In this thesis we will primarily demonstrate how additional scalar degrees of freedom - which are motivated from many high-energy embeddings - open up new observational windows onto the physics of inflation. We construct a Bayesian…
A self-consistent pre-inflationary extension of the inflationary scenario with the Starobinsky potential, favored by Planck data, is studied using techniques from loop quantum cosmology (LQC). The results are compared with the quadratic…
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…
The temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background observed by COBE provide strong support for an inflationary phase in the early universe, below the GUT scale. We argue that a singlet field in a hidden sector of an effective…
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…