Related papers: Small field models with gravitational wave signatu…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors are a compelling class of inflationary models. They lead to universal predictions for large-scale observables, broadly independent from the functional form of the inflaton potential. In this work we derive…
BICEP2 measurement of primordial tensor modes in CMB suggests that cosmological inflation is due to a slowly rolling inflaton taking trans-Planckian values and provides further experimental evidence for the absence of large $M_{\rm P}$…
We investigate the degree to which the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) can be used to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity coming from the presence of spinning particles coupled to the inflaton. We compute the $\langle TTT \rangle$ and…
We unify one of the most widely studied frameworks to explain the hierarchical structure of the flavor sector in the Standard Model, the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism, with cosmic inflation. We propose that the complex scalar field, the…
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…
Current measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropy power spectra of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) seem to indicate that the naive expectation for the slow-roll hierarchy within the most simple inflationary paradigm…
Multi-field models of inflation typically assume that interactions between particles can be treated perturbatively. Strongly-coupled models provide an intriguing alternative and may offer novel inflationary phenomenology. We study the…
We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The…
Inflation is now an accepted paradigm in standard cosmology, with its predictions consistent with observations of the cosmic microwave background. It lacks, however, a firm physical theory, with many possible theoretical origins beyond the…
We present limits on the fraction of large angle microwave anisotropies which could come from tensor perturbations. We use the COBE results as well as smaller scale CMB observations, measurements of galaxy correlations, abundances of galaxy…
We use the most recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) data to perform a Bayesian statistical analysis and discuss the observational viability of inflationary models with a non-minimal coupling,~$\xi$, between the inflaton field and the…
We study a model of inflation based on $\mathcal{N}=1$ supergravity essentially depending on one effective parameter. Under a field transformation we show that this model turns out to be equivalent to a previously studied supergravity model…
In this article, we do a thorough investigation of the competency of the forthcoming Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Galaxy surveys in probing the features in the primordial power spectrum. Primordial features are specific…
We perform a Bayesian analysis to study possible features in the primordial inflationary power spectrum of scalar perturbations. In particular, we analyse the possibility of detecting the imprint of these primordial features in the…
We revisit a class of simple single-field inflation models and demonstrate that they can readily produce a negligible tensor/scalar ratio $r$. Motivated by recent work suggesting the need to introduce higher order operators to stabilise…
We investigate the ability of current CMB data to reliably constrain the form of the primordial power spectrum generated during inflation. We attempt to identify more exotic power spectra that yield equally good fits to the data as simple…
We study to what extent the spectral index $n_s$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ determine the field excursion $\Delta\phi$ during inflation. We analyse the possible degeneracy of $\Delta \phi$ by comparing three broad classes of…
We present a measurement of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) using data from the South Pole Telescope (SPT). The data consist of 790 square degrees of sky observed at 150 GHz during 2008 and 2009. Here we…
The B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a unique window into tensor perturbations from inflationary gravitational waves. Survey effects complicate the estimation and description of the power spectrum on the…
We study several anisotropic inflationary models and their implications for the observed violation of statistical isotropy in the CMBR data. In two of these models the anisotropy decays very quickly during the inflationary phase of…