Related papers: Effective Planck Mass and the Scale of Inflation
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…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
Because the scale of inflation is conformal frame dependent, in order to fully characterize it one should quote its value in terms of all the independent equal-time dimensionless ratios in the theory. We argue that when couplings depend on…
In this paper we will analyze generic predictions of an inflection-point model of inflation with Hubble-induced corrections and study them in light of the Planck data. Typically inflection-point models of inflation can be embedded within…
The observed power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which predicts a nearly scale-invariant power spectrum of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field as they exit the Hubble…
If the inflationary phase lasted longer than the minimal period, the length scales observed today originate from modes that were smaller than the Planck length during inflation. It was recently argued that this "trans-Planckian problem" can…
We construct a model of inflation based on a low-energy effective theory of spontaneously broken global scale invariance. This provides a shift symmetry that protects the inflaton potential from quantum corrections. Since the underlying…
We point out that the prediction of the minimal chaotic inflation model is altered if a scalar field takes a large field value close to the Planck scale during inflation due to a negative Hubble induced mass. In particular, we show that the…
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…
Decoupling of heavy modes in effective low energy theory is one of the most fundamental concepts in physics. It tells us that modes must have a negligible effect on the physics of gravitational backgrounds with curvature radius larger than…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
We determine the frequency of regions of small-field inflation in the Wigner landscape as an approximation to random supergravities/type IIB flux compactifications. We show that small-field inflation occurs exponentially more often than…
We calculate the spectrum of density fluctuations in models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, and specifically investigate the dependence of the predictions on modifications of the…
Allowing for the possibility of large extra dimensions, the fundamental Planck scale $M$ could be anywhere in the range $\TeV\lsim M\lsim \mpl$, where $\mpl=2.4\times 10^{18}\GeV$ is the four-dimensional Planck scale. If $M\sim\TeV$,…
In this paper, inflationary cosmology is reviewed, paying particular attention to its observational signatures associated with large-scale density perturbations generated from quantum fluctuations. In the most general scalar-tensor theories…
We study the effects of the trans-Planckian dispersion relation on the spectrum of the primordial density perturbations during inflation. In contrast to the earlier analyses, we do not assume any specific form of the dispersion relation and…
An inflationary model in the framework of noncommutative space-time may generate a nontrivial running of the scalar spectral index, but usually induces a large tensor-to-scalar ratio simultaneously. With the latest observational data from…
For any given momentum transfer, gravitational interactions have a strength set by a characteristic scale $M_*$ inferred from amplitudes calculated in an effective theory with a strong coupling scale $M_{**}$. These are in general different…
In this paper we provide an accurate bound on primordial gravitational waves, i.e. tensor-to-scalar ratio $(r)$ for a general class of single-field models of inflation where inflation occurs always below the Planck scale, and the field…
The accelerated expansion of space during the period of cosmological inflation leads to trans-Planckian issues which need to be addressed. Most importantly, the physical wavelength of fluctuations which are studied at the present time by…