Related papers: How Likely are Constituent Quanta to Initiate Infl…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
Inflationary cosmology leads to the picture of a "multiverse," involving an infinite number of (spatially infinite) post-inflationary thermalized regions, called pocket universes. In the context of theories with many vacua, such as the…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
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…
We have investigated the generality of inflation (the probability of inflation in other words) in closed FRW models for a wide class of quintessence potentials. It is shown that inflation is not suppressed for most of them and for a wide…
I present a very simplistic toy model for the inflationary paradigm where the size of the universe undergoes a period of exponential growth. The basic assumption I make use of is that black holes might have a quantized area (mass) spectrum…
We show that the initial field values required to produce inflation in the two fields original hybrid model, and its supergravity F-term extension, do not suffer from any fine-tuning problem, even when the fields are restricted to be…
The evolution of a scalar field is explored taking into account the presence of a background fluid in a positively curved Universe in the framework of loop quantum cosmology. Though the mechanism that provides the initial conditions for…
Methods and concepts for the study of phase transitions mediated by a time-dependent order-parameter field in curved spacetimes are discussed. A practical example is the derivation of an effective (quasi-)potential for the description of…
In this paper we put forward the idea that the comoving Hubble horizon undergoes multiple stages of contraction (a.k.a. inflationary phase) and expansion. The observable inflation, that produces the CMB anisotropies and generates primordial…
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…
If a coupling between the inflaton and the Gauss-Bonnet term is introduced, many models of inflation that were ruled out by the most recent Planck data can be made viable again. The predictions for the scalar spectral index and…
Recently, a model of inflation using non-minimally coupled massive vector fields has been proposed. For a particular choice of non-minimal coupling parameter and for a flat FRW model, the model is reduced to the model of chaotic inflation…
After reviewing the general ideas of quantum cosmology (Wheeler-DeWitt equation, boundary conditions, interpretation of $\psi$), I discuss how these ideas can be tested observationally. Observational predictions differ for different choices…
We investigate the initial conditions problem for multifield inflation. In these scenarios the pre-inflationary dynamics can be chaotic, increasing the sensitivity of the onset of inflation to the initial data even in the homogeneous limit.…
We show that the constraints which follow from the {\it Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture} for inflationary cosmology can be strengthened if the pre-inflationary universe was dominated by radiation. The resulting upper bound on the…
Due to the quasi-exponential red-shifting which occurs during an inflationary period in the very early Universe, wavelengths which at the present time correspond to cosmological lengths are in general sub-Planckian during the early stages…
We consider a model of inflation which has recently been proposed in the literature and where inflation is induced by corrections to the energy density coming from the non-commutativity of spacetime. We show that the very rapid inflationary…
In the framework of a cosmological model of the Universe filled with a nonrelativistic particle soup, we easily reproduce inflation due to the quantum potential. The lightest particles in the soup serve as a driving force of this simple,…
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…