Related papers: Can Gravitational Instantons Really Constrain Axio…
Inflation and quintessence can both be described by a single scalar field. The cosmic time evolution of this cosmon field realizes a crossover from the region of an ultraviolet fixed point in the infinite past to an infrared fixed point in…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
Oscillons are massive, long-lived, localized excitations of a scalar field. We show that in a large class of well-motivated single-field models, inflation is followed by self-resonance, leading to copious oscillon generation and a lengthy…
We point out three correlated predictions of the axion monodromy inflation model: large amplitude of gravitational waves, suppression of power on horizon scales and on scales relevant for the formation of dwarf galaxies. While these…
In this paper, we compare dispersions of a scalar field in Euclidean quantum gravity with stochastic inflation. We use Einstein gravity and a minimally coupled scalar field with a quadratic potential. We restrict our attention to small mass…
We derive the scalar potential in four spacetime dimensions from an eight-dimensional $(R+\gamma R^4-2\Lambda-F_4^2)$ gravity model in the presence of the 4-form $F_4$, with the (modified gravity) coupling constant $\gamma$ and the…
The O(4)-symmetric regular instanton solutions are studied within the framework of the Eddington-inspired-Born-Infeld gravity (EiBI). We find that the behavior of the solution would deviate from that in Einstein gravity when the kinetic…
We show that the hybrid inflation is naturally realized in the framework of a supersymmetric axion model, which is consistent with the WMAP observation if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scale is around 10^{15}GeV. By solving the post…
We examine the inflationary modes in the cubic curvature theories in the context of asymptotically safe gravity. On the phase space of the Hubble parameter, there exists a critical point which corresponds to the slow-roll inflation in…
We investigate Euclidean wormholes in Einstein gravity with a massless scalar field in de Sitter space. Euclidean wormholes are possible due to the analytic continuation of the time as well as complexification of fields, where we need to…
Models of inflation based on axions, which owe their popularity to the robustness against UV corrections, have also a very distinct class of signatures. The relevant interactions of the axion are a non-perturbative oscillating contribution…
The electric Weak Gravity Conjecture demands that axions with large decay constant $f$ couple to light instantons. The resulting large instantonic corrections pose problems for natural inflation. We explore an alternative argument based on…
We show that simple strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories with quantum moduli spaces can naturally lead to hybrid inflation. These theories contain no input dimensionful or small parameters. The effective superpotential is linear…
We study minimal versions of Higgs inflation in the presence of a massless QCD axion. While the inflationary energy scale of the metric variant is too high to accommodate isocurvature bounds, it was argued that Palatini Higgs inflation…
Generically, the gravitational-wave or tensor-mode contribution to the primordial curvature spectrum of inflation is tiny if the field-range of the inflaton is much smaller than the Planck scale. We show that this pessimistic conclusion is…
As part of our program to develop a general theory of relativity for open systems, we introduce a covariant theory that incorporates the effects of classical and quantum spacetime alterations in a new metric tensor that effectively includes…
We examine a scalar-tensor model of gravity that is globally scale-invariant. When adapted to a spatially flat Robertson-Walker metric, the equations of motion describe a dynamical system that flows from an unstable de Sitter space to a…
We perform a first principles computation of the spectrum of gravity waves produced in open inflationary universes. The background spacetime is taken to be the continuation of an instanton saddle point of the Euclidean no boundary path…
Equipped with concrete examples of Type IIB orientifolds featuring poly-instanton corrections to the superpotential, the effects on moduli stabilization and inflationary cosmology are analyzed. Working in the framework of the LARGE volume…
High-scale string inflationary models are in well-known tension with low-energy supersymmetry. A promising solution involves models where the inflaton is the volume of the extra dimensions so that the gravitino mass relaxes from large…