Related papers: Inflationary field excursion in broad classes of s…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
We analyze the flow into inflation for generic "single-clock" systems, by combining an effective field theory approach with a dynamical-systems analysis. In this approach, we construct an expansion for the potential-like term in the…
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…
In this work, we investigate how a smooth transition from a constant-roll to a slow-roll inflationary era may be realized, in the context of a canonical scalar field theory. We study in some detail the dynamical evolution of the…
In this work, we analyze two possible alternative and model-independent approaches to describe the inflationary period. The first one assumes a general equation of state during inflation due to Mukhanov, while the second one is based on the…
Single-field models of inflation are analysed in light of the WMAP five-year data. Assuming instantaneous reheating, we find that modular/new inflation models with small powers in the effective inflaton self-interaction are more strongly…
We investigate slow-roll inflation in a multi-field random Gaussian landscape. The landscape is assumed to be small-field, with a correlation length much smaller than the Planck scale. Inflation then typically occurs in small patches of the…
We calculate the scalar gravitational and matter perturbations in the context of slow-roll inflation with multiple scalar fields, that take values on a (curved) manifold, to first order in slow roll. For that purpose a basis for these…
It was recently proposed that a field theory cannot be consistent with quantum gravity if it allows a mode shorter than the Planck length to exit the Hubble horizon. This is called the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC). We discuss…
A corpuscular quantum description of inflation shows that there is no fundamental problem with trans-Planckian excursions of the inflaton field up to about 100 Planck masses, with the upper bound coming from the corpuscular quantum effects.…
Inflation models can have an early phase of inflation where the evolution of the inflaton is driven by quantum fluctuations before entering the phase driven by the slope of the scalar field potential. For a Coleman-Weinberg potential this…
Effective field theory is a powerful organizing principle that allows to describe physics below a certain scale model-independently. Above that energy scale, identified with the cutoff, the EFT description breaks down and new physics is…
We present an explicit cosmological model where inflation and dark energy both could arise from the dynamics of the same scalar field. We present our discussion in the framework where the inflaton field $\phi$ attains a nearly constant…
If the cosmological inflationary scenario took place in the cosmic landscape in string theory, the inflaton, the scalar mode responsible for inflation, would have meandered in a complicated multi-dimensional potential. We show that this…
Inflation in an open universe produced by Coleman-De Luccia (CDL) tunneling induces a friction term that is strong enough to allow for successful small-field inflation in models that would otherwise suffer from a severe overshoot problem.…
We construct a family of simple single-field inflation models consistent with Planck / BICEP Keck bounds which have a parametrically small tensor amplitude and no running of the scalar spectral index. The construction consists of a…
We introduce a simple string model of inflation, in which the inflaton field can take trans-Planckian values while driving a period of slow-roll inflation. This leads naturally to a realisation of large field inflation, inasmuch as the…
In Ref. [1], it was claimed that in the spatially flat cosmological case there exists a unique conserved measure (up to normalization) on the $(\phi,\dot{\phi})$ phase space for scalar field with $m^2\phi^2$ potential by finding a unique…
We demonstrate that the approximation for the number of inflationary e-folds commonly used in the literature can lead to highly inaccurate predictions for the amplitude of primordial gravitational waves. We show that such an approximation…
We elucidate the counting of the relevant small parameters in inflationary perturbation theory. Doing this allows for an explicit delineation of the domain of validity of the semi-classical approximation to gravity used in the calculation…