Related papers: Tunnelling in Dante's Inferno

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…

We study inflationary dynamics using a recently introduced classical-quantum correspondence for investigating the backreaction of a quantum mechanical degree of freedom to a classical background. Using specifically a coupled…

The comment [1, arXiv:1308.5573] raises two points in regard to our work [2, arXiv:1207.0230]. The first is that one cannot use the tunneling picture to obtain the temperature and particle production rate in the Friedman-Robertson-Walker…

We study the quantization of the Einstein-Hilbert action for a small true vacuum bubble without matter or scalar field. The quantization of action induces an extra term of potential called quantum potential in Hamilton-Jacobi equation,…

We compute the evolution of the entanglement entropy for a massless field within a spherical region throughout the inflationary period and the subsequent era of radiation domination, starting from the Bunch-Davies vacuum. In order to focus…

Within the framework of the scalar-tensor theory we consider a hill-climbing inflation, in which the effective Planck mass increases in time. We obtain the Einstein frame potential with infinitely long and flat plateau as we approach…

Eternal inflation requires upward fluctuations of the energy in a Hubble volume, which appear to violate the energy conditions. In particular, a scalar field in an inflating spacetime should obey the averaged null energy condition, which…

Currently favoured extensions of the Standard Model typically contain `flaton fields' defined as fields with large vacuum expectation values (vevs) and almost flat potentials. If a flaton field is trapped at the origin in the early…

We study the dynamics of the standard model Higgs field in the inflationary cosmology. Since metastability of our vacuum is indicated by the current experimental data of the Higgs boson and top quark, inflation models with a large Hubble…

We investigate the parameter space of hybrid inflation models where inflation terminates via a first-order phase transition causing nucleation of bubbles. Such models experience a tension from the need to ensure nearly scale invariant…

Whereas preheating after chaotic and hybrid inflation models has been abundantly studied in the literature, preheating in small field inflation models, where the curvature of the inflaton potential is negative during inflation, remains less…

We derive the finite-temperature quantum-tunneling rate from first principles. The rate depends on both real- and imaginary-time; we demonstrate that the relevant instantons should therefore be defined on a Schwinger-Keldysh contour, and…

Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…

We consider curved space quantum corrections to the equations of motion of the inflaton field in the early Universe. Using the stochastic formalism in phase space, we demonstrate that the quantum corrected evolution of the inflaton can…

We consider cosmological scenarios in which density perturbations are generated by the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field at early times; the late time dynamics involves a modulus which first dominates the energy density of the…

We analyze quantum-mechanical counterpart of Newtonian cosmology and show that effects of zero-point motion eliminate classical density singularity. Quantum effects are particularly significant for closed Universes where without the…

We show that a large class of two-field models of single-bubble open inflation do not lead to infinite open universes, as it was previously thought, but to an ensemble of very large but finite inflating `islands'. The reason is that the…

We describe a general scenario, dubbed "Inflatable Dark Matter", in which the density of dark matter particles can be reduced through a short period of late-time inflation in the early universe. The overproduction of dark matter that is…

In Chain Inflation the universe tunnels along a series of false vacua of ever-decreasing energy. The main goal of this paper is to embed Chain Inflation in high energy fundamental physics. We begin by illustrating a simple effective…

We consider the possibility of observing the onset of the late time inflation of our patch of the Universe. The Hubble size criterion and the event horizon criterion are applied to several dark energy models to discuss the problem of future…