Related papers: Low reheating temperatures in monomial and binomia…
The BICEP2 collaboration reports a detection of primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode with a tensor-scalar ratio $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ (68% C.L.). However, this result is in tension with the recent Planck limit, $r<0.11$…
Although it is well known that the bulk of dark matter (DM) has to be cold, the existence of an additional sub-dominant, hot species remains a valid possibility. In this paper we investigate the potential of the cosmic shear power spectrum…
We consider two non-standard cosmological scenaria according to which the universe is reheated to a low reheating temperature after the late decay of a scalar field or is dominated by the kinetic energy of a quintessence field in the…
This paper presents the Planck 2015 likelihoods, statistical descriptions of the 2-point correlations of CMB data, using the hybrid approach employed previously: pixel-based at $\ell<30$ and a Gaussian approximation to the distribution of…
The potential $V(\phi)=\lambda \phi^{n}$ is responsible for the inflation of the universe as scalar field $\phi$ oscillates quickly around some point where $V(\phi)$ has a minimum. The end of this stage has an important role on the further…
Cosmic Microwave Background temperature and polarization anisotropies from Planck have estimated a lower value of the optical depth to reionization ($\tau$) compared to WMAP. A significant period in the reionization history would then fall…
We investigate how inflation model selection is affected by the presence of additional free-streaming relativistic degrees of freedom, i.e. dark radiation. We perform a full Bayesian analysis of both inflation parameters and cosmological…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…
We present a successful inflation model based on $\lambda \phi^4$ potential in which a Standard Model (SM) singlet inflaton $\phi$, with mass of around a TeV or less, also plays the role of a weakly interacting scalar dark matter particle…
The BICEP/$\textit{Keck}$ (BK) series of cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization experiments has, over the past decade and a half, produced a series of field-leading constraints on cosmic inflation via measurements of the "B-mode"…
We confront the warm inflation observational predictions directly with the latest CMB data. We focus on a linear temperature (T) dissipative coefficient combined with the simplest model of inflation, a quartic chaotic potential. Although…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies exhibit a large-scale dipolar power asymmetry. To determine whether this is due to a real, physical modulation or is simply a large statistical fluctuation requires the…
We propose an idea to build a bridge between reheating and late-time observations in quintessential inflation by backtracking the evolution of the inflaton field from the present time to the end of reheating. This idea is implemented when…
We investigate the thermalization process of the Universe after inflation to determine the evolution of the effective temperature. The time scale of thermalization is found to be so long that it delays the evolution of the effective…
Reheating is a transition era after the end of inflation, during which the inflaton is converted into the particles that populate the Universe at later times. No direct cosmological observables are normally traceable to this period of…
We discuss implications of the latest BICEP/Keck data release for inflationary models, with particular emphasis on scalar fields with non-canonical Lagrangians of the type ${\cal L} = X^\alpha - V(\phi)$. The observational upper bound on…
The 2015 Planck data release tightened the region of the allowed inflationary models. Inflationary models with convex potentials have now been ruled out since they produce a large tensor to scalar ratio. Meanwhile the same data offers…
Motivated by BICEP2 results on the CMB polarization B-mode which imply primordial gravitational waves are produced when the Universe has the expansion rate of about $H \approx 10^{14}$ GeV, and by deviations from a smooth power-law…
We discuss the model selection problem for inflationary cosmology. We couple ModeCode, a publicly-available numerical solver for the primordial perturbation spectra, to the nested sampler MultiNest, in order to efficiently compute Bayesian…