Related papers: Large Scale Power Suppression in a Multifield Land…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
The power spectrum of M-theory cascade inflation is derived. It possesses three distinctive signatures: a decisive power suppression at small scales, oscillations around the scales that cross the horizon when the inflaton potential jumps…
Recently is has been suggested that the dearth of small halos around the Milky Way arises due to a modification of the primordial power spectrum of fluctuations from inflation. Such modifications would be expected to alter the formation of…
In the context of string theory, several conjectural conditions have been proposed for low energy effective field theories not to be in swampland, the UV-incomplete class. The recent ones represented by the de Sitter and trans-Planckian…
We estimate large-scale curvature perturbations from isocurvature fluctuations in the waterfall field during hybrid inflation, in addition to the usual inflaton field perturbations. The tachyonic instability at the end of inflation leads to…
We summarize three recent efforts to constrain the first few moments of cosmic creation before and during the epoch of inflation. We consider two means to explain a slight dip in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background for…
Massive fields during inflation provide an interesting opportunity to test new physics at very high energy scales. Meanwhile in fundamental realizations, the inflationary field space typically has a curved geometry, which may leave…
A short introduction to structure formation is given, followed by a discussion of the possible characteristics of the initial perturbations assuming a generic inflationary origin. Observational data related to large-scale structure and the…
Inflationary models predict a correlation between primordial density perturbations (scalar metric perturbations) and gravitational waves (tensor metric perturbations) in the form of a scalar-scalar-tensor three-point correlation, or…
We examine the dynamics of inflation driven by multiple, interacting scalar fields and derive a multi field version of the Hubble slow roll expansion. We show that the properties of this expansion naturally generalize those of the single…
We initiate the study of multi-field inflation using holography. Bulk light scalar fields correspond to nearly marginal operators in the boundary theory and the dual quantum field theory is a deformation of a CFT by such operators. We…
We study thermally induced density perturbations during inflation. This scenario is characterized by two thermodynamical conditions: (1) The primordial perturbations originate in the epoch when the inflationary universe contains a…
Heavy isocurvature fields may have a strong influence on the low energy dynamics of curvature perturbations during inflation, as long as the inflationary trajectory becomes non-geodesic in the multi-field target space (the landscape). If…
The spatial curvature of the universe is not yet known. Even though at present the Universe is very close to being essentially flat and most signatures of curvature appear to have been diluted by inflation, if the number of e-foldings…
We study the amplification of the curvature perturbations due to a small sound speed and find that its origin is different completely from that due to the ultraslow-roll inflation. This is because when the sound speed is very small the…
We argue that the observed large-scale cosmic microwave anomalies, discovered by WMAP and confirmed by the Planck satellite, are most naturally explained in the context of a marginally-open universe. Particular focus is placed on the dipole…
The absence of large-angle correlations in the map of cosmic microwave background temperature fluctuations is among the well-established anomalies identified in full-sky and cut-sky maps over the past three decades. Suppressed large-angle…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
We revisit the physics of transitions from a general equation of state parameter to the final stage of slow-roll inflation. We show that it is unlikely for the modes comprising the cosmic microwave background to contain imprints from a…
In inflationary scenarios with more than one scalar field, inflation may proceed even if each of the individual fields has a potential too steep for that field to sustain inflation on its own. We show that scalar fields with exponential…