Related papers: Reassessing the link between B-modes and inflation
Cosmological inflation is the dominating paradigm to account for observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In this thesis, we study the phenomenology of a class of particularly well motivated models of inflation, known under…
Supersolid inflation is a class of inflationary theories that simultaneously breaks time and space reparameterization invariance during inflation, with distinctive features for the dynamics of cosmological fluctuations. We investigate…
Last year we argued that if slow-roll inflation followed the decay of a false vacuum in a large landscape, the steepening of the scalar potential between the inflationary plateau and the barrier generically leads to a potentially observable…
In numerical calculations of the primordial power spectrum of perturbations produced during inflation, for very little wavenumber $k$s, to implement the initial conditions required of the perturbation mode functions consistently, we must…
The weak gravity conjecture imposes severe constraints on natural inflation. A trans-Planckian axion decay constant can only be realized if the potential exhibits an additional (subdominant) modulation with sub-Planckian periodicity. The…
The apparent alignment of the cosmic microwave background multipoles on large scales challenges the standard cosmological model. Scalar field inflation is isotropic and cannot account for the observed alignment. We explore the imprints, a…
We study the back-reaction of moduli fields on the inflaton potential in generic models of F-term inflation. We derive the moduli corrections as a power series in the ratio of Hubble scale and modulus mass. The general result is illustrated…
The precision reached by the recent CMB measurements gives new insights into the shape of the primordial power spectra of the cosmological perturbations. In the context of inflationary cosmology, this implies that the CMB data are now…
We report forecast constraints on warm inflation in the light of future cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys, with data expected to be available in the coming decade. These observations could finally give us the missing information…
Primordial gravitational waves generated during inflation lead to the B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background and a stochastic gravitational wave background in the Universe. We will explore the current constraint on the tilt…
It has been shown that a three-point correlation function of tensor perturbations from a bounce model in general relativity with a minimally-coupled scalar field is highly suppressed, and the resultant three-point function of cosmic…
It is proposed that if quantum states of space-time are coherent on null surfaces, holographic Planck-scale fluctuations of inflationary horizons dominate the formation of primordial scalar curvature perturbations. It is shown that the…
We investigate the impact of a hypothesized delayed initiation of inflation, characterized by a cutoff k_min to the primordial power spectrum in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This cutoff affects both the scalar and tensor spectra,…
A sizeable tensor-to-scalar ratio, such as recently claimed by BICEP2, would imply a scale of inflation at the typical scale of supersymmetric grand unification. This could be an accident, or strong support for supersymmetric theories.…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
We explore the observational implications of models of intermediate inflation driven by modified dispersion relations, specifically those representing the phenomenon of dimensional reduction in the ultraviolet limit. These models are…
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)…
Standard models describing the radiation transfer of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) through Compton scattering predict that cosmological scalar perturbations at linear order are not able to source V and B polarization modes. In this…
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…
There is solid theoretical and observational motivation behind the idea of scale-invariance as a fundamental symmetry of Nature. We consider a recently proposed classically scale-invariant inflationary model, quadratic in curvature and…