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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…
Quintessential inflation unifies inflation and late time acceleration by a single scalar field. Such a scenario, with canonical and non-canonical scalar fields, has been discussed . The scalar field behaves as an inflaton field during…
We study the implications on inflation of an infinite tower of higher-spin states with masses falling exponentially at large field distances, as dictated by the Swampland Distance Conjecture. We show that the Higuchi lower bound on the mass…
We introduce the cosmic holographic bounds with two UV and IR cutoff scales, to deal with both the inflationary universe in the past and dark energy in the future. To describe quantum fluctuations of inflation on sub-horizon scales, we use…
Dilaton stabilisation is usually considered to pose a serious obstacle to successful $D$-term inflation in superstring theories. We argue that the physics of gaugino condensation is likely to be modified during the inflationary phase in…
We investigate the circumstances under which cosmic inflation can arise from very inhomogeneous initial conditions using numerical relativity simulations. Previous studies have not considered cases with non-zero momentum density due to…
The temperature at the end of reheating and the length of this cosmological phase can be bound to the inflationary observables if one considers the cosmological evolution from the time of Hubble crossing until today. There are many examples…
A new model of thermal inflation is introduced, in which the mass of the thermal waterfall field is dependent on a light spectator scalar field. Using the $\delta N$ formalism, the "end of inflation" scenario is investigated in order to…
We discuss the issue of setting appropriate initial conditions for inflation. Specifically, we consider natural inflation model and discuss the fine tuning required for setting almost homogeneous initial conditions over a region of order…
In this article, we study a type of one-field approach for open inflationary universe scenario in the context of braneworld models with a Gauss-Bonnet correction term. For a one-bubble universe model, we determine and characterize the…
It was recently proposed that a field theory cannot be consistent with quantum gravity if it allows a mode shorter than the Planck length to exit the Hubble horizon. This is called the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC). We discuss…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
In the framework of chaotic inflation we study the case of a massive scalar field using a semiclassical approach. We derive the energy density fluctuations in the infrared sector generated by matter field and gauge-invariant metric…
We study dynamical moduli stabilization driven by gaugino condensation in supergravity. In the presence of background radiation, there exists a region of initial conditions leading to successful stabilization. We point out that most of the…
We apply the squeezed state formalism to scalar field dark matter (e.g. axion) perturbations generated during inflation. As for the inflationary perturbations, the scalar field state becomes highly squeezed as modes exit the horizon. For as…
Quantum particles interacting with potential barriers are ubiquitous in physics, and the question of how much time they spend inside classically forbidden regions has attracted interest for many decades. Recent developments of new…
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…
In the model of Chain Inflation, a sequential chain of coupled scalar fields drives inflation. We consider a multidimensional potential with a large number of bowls, or local minima, separated by energy barriers: inflation takes place as…
The previous proposal (by two of us) of chain inflation with the QCD axion is shown to fail. The proposal involved a series of fast tunneling events, yet here it is shown that tunneling is too slow. We calculate the bubble nucleation rates…
We perform a semi-classical analysis of the Emergent Universe scenario for inflation. Fixing the background, and taking the inflaton to be homogenous, we cast the inflaton's evolution as a one-dimensional quantum mechanics problem. We find…