Related papers: Multi-field inflation and cosmological perturbatio…
These lecture notes provide an introduction to cosmic inflation. In particular I will review the basic concepts of inflation, generation of density perturbations, and reheating after inflation.
Inflation is an early period of accelerated cosmic expansion, thought to be sourced by high energy physics. A key task today is to use the influx of increasingly precise observational data to constrain the plethora of inflationary models…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
We construct the gauge invariant free action for cosmological perturbations for the nonminimally coupled inflaton field in the Jordan frame. For this the phase space formalism is used, which keeps track of all the dynamical and constraint…
We investigate cosmology with complex scalar field. It is shown that such models can describe two stages of inflation and the oscillatory regime. Thus we don't need both quintessence and $\Lambda$-term. It is enough to have single complex…
We investigate the inflationary universe in a theory where two scalar fields non-minimally coupling to the scalar curvature and an extra $R^2$ term exist and the conformal invariance is broken. In particular, the slow-roll inflation is…
This is a pedagogical introduction to early cosmology and the host of fundamental physics involved in it (particle physics, grand unification and general relativity). Inflation and the inflaton field are the central theme of this review.…
We discuss the interaction between perturbations in the inflaton and the background during the preheating phase in simple inflationary models. By numerically solving the Einstein field equations we are able to assess the impact of…
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
In an alternative mechanism recently proposed, adiabatic cosmological perturbations are generated at the decay of the inflaton field due to small fluctuations of its coupling to matter. This happens whenever the coupling is governed by the…
We study multifield contributions to the scalar power spectrum in an ensemble of six-field inflationary models obtained in string theory. We identify examples in which inflation occurs by chance, near an approximate inflection point, and we…
The current status of the recent developments of the second-order gauge-invariant cosmological perturbation theory is reviewed. To show the essence of this perturbation theory, we concentrate only on the universe filled with a single scalar…
The observational signatures of multi-field inflation will generally evolve as the Universe reheats. We introduce a general analytic formalism for tracking this evolution through perturbative reheating, applicable to two field models with…
We propose one way to regularize the fluctuations generated during inflation, whose infrared (IR) corrections diverge logarithmically. In the case of a single field inflation model, recently, we proposed one solution to the IR divergence…
We give a pedagogical review of a covariant and fully non-perturbative approach to study nonlinear perturbations in cosmology. In the first part, devoted to cosmological fluids, we define a nonlinear extension of the uniform-density…
In this paper we analyze scalar gravitational perturbations on a Robertson-Walker background in the presence of multiple scalar fields that take values on a (geometrically non-trivial) field manifold during slow-roll inflation. For this…
We study quantum fluctuations of a free massless scalar field during inflation in the presence of a point, line, or plane defect such as a black hole, cosmic string, or domain wall, using a perturbative expansion in powers of small defect…
We compute the spectrum of cosmological perturbations in a scenario in which inflation is driven by radiation in a non-commutative space-time. In this scenario, the non-commutativity of space and time leads to a modified dispersion relation…
The non-Gaussianity of inflationary perturbations, as encoded in the bispectrum (or 3-point correlator), has become an important additional way of distinguishing between inflation models, going beyond the linear Gaussian perturbation…
We investigate multi-field inflationary scenarios with fields that drop out of the model in a staggered fashion. This feature is natural in certain multi-field inflationary setups within string theory; for instance, it can manifest itself…