Related papers: Fine Tuning May Not Be Enough
The end of inflation is connected to the standard cosmological scenario through reheating. During reheating, the inflaton oscillates around the minimum of the potential and thus decays into the daughter particles that populate the Universe…
We investigate the possibility of using the only known fundamental scalar, the Higgs, as an inflaton with minimal coupling to gravity. The peculiar appearance of a plateau or a false vacuum in the renormalised effective scalar potential…
We extend the idea of assisted inflation to the case of power-law potentials and demonstrate the simultaneous resolution of two major problems that plague chaotic inflation. The implementation of the same idea in the framework of a…
Inflation with tunneling from a false to a true vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a scalar field that slows down the initial de Sitter phase. As a by-product this field also sets dynamically the value of the Newton constant observed…
We show that the primordial curvature perturbations may originate not from the quantum fluctuations of inflaton during inflation but from isocurvature perturbations which are amplified during preheating after inflation. We consider a simple…
Within the framework of metric-affine theories of gravity, where both the metric and connection are treated as independent variables, we consider actions quadratic in the Ricci scalar curvature coupled non-minimally to a scalar field…
Hybrid inflation faces two well-known problems: the blue spectrum of the non-supersymmetric version of the model and the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the fields leading to sufficient inflation to account for the standard…
Usual inflation is realized with a slow rolling scalar field minimally coupled to gravity. In contrast, we consider dynamics of a scalar with a flat effective potential, conformally coupled to gravity. Surprisingly, it contains an attractor…
Inflation is nowadays a well-established paradigm consistent with all the observations. The precise nature of the inflaton is however unknown and its role could be played by any candidate able to imitate a scalar condensate in the slow-roll…
During inflation, higher derivative terms in the gravitational action may play a significant role. Building on new stable formulations of four-derivative scalar-tensor theories, we study the impact of these corrections in the case where the…
In this paper we consider a new approach to unify inflation and the late universe with dark energy and dark matter formulated in a model that includes a non-Riemannian metric independent measure and a scalar field with spontaneously broken…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
Because the inflationary mechanism is extremely sensitive to UV-physics, the construction of theoretically robust models of inflation provides a unique window on Planck-scale physics. We review efforts to use an axion with a shift symmetry…
Any one-field inflation is actually realized in a multifield configuration because the inflaton must have couplings with other fields to reheat the universe and is coupled to all other fields at least gravitationally. In all single inflaton…
A new family of inflation models is introduced and studied. The models are characterised by a scalar potential which, far from the origin, approaches an inflationary plateau in a power-law manner, while near the origin becomes monomial, as…
A detection of primordial B-modes has been heralded not only as a smoking gun for the existence of inflation, but also as a way to establish the scale at which inflation took place. In this paper we critically reinvestigate the connection…
We study the inflationary consequences of Degenerate Higher Order Scalar Tensor (DHOST) theories in a de Sitter background. We perturb the de Sitter background by operators breaking either the degeneracy condition, i.e scordatura DHOST, or…
We study $F(R)$ modified gravity models which are capable of driving the accelerating epoch of the Universe at the present time whilst not destroying the standard Big Bang and inflationary cosmology. Recent studies have shown that a weak…
If the conformal invariance of electromagnetism is broken during inflation, then primordial magnetic fields may be produced. If this symmetry breaking is generated by the coupling between electromagnetism and a scalar field---e.g. the…
We study non-minimally coupled scalar-induced multi-phase inflation in metric and Palatini gravity, considering linear, Brans-Dicke-like, and Higgs-like sectors. The scalar spectral index lies in the range \( n_s \simeq 0.93 \ \text{--} \…