Related papers: Massive Fields as Systematics for Single Field Inf…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
Long standing themes in inflation include the issue of large field vs. small field inflation as well as the question what fraction of phase space leads to sufficient inflation, and furthermore is compatible with the experimental data. In…
Single-field models of $\alpha$-attractor quintessential inflation provide a unified picture of the two periods of early- and late-time cosmic acceleration, where both inflation and dark energy are described by a single scalar degree of…
One of the fundamental questions in inflation is how to characterize the structure of different types of models in the field theoretic landscape. Proposals in this direction include attempts to directly characterize the formal structure of…
We study implications of perturbative unitarity for quasi-single field inflation with the inflaton and one massive scalar. Analyzing high energy scattering, we show that non-Gaussianities with $|f_{\rm NL}|\gtrsim1$ cannot be realized…
We revisit perturbative unitarity in scalar field inflation with a nonminimal coupling, with Higgs inflation serving as the most prominent example. Although such models are phenomenologically successful, it is critical to examine whether or…
We show non-perturbatively that the power spectrum of a self-interacting scalar field in de Sitter space-time is strongly suppressed on large scales. The cut-off scale depends on the strength of the self-coupling, the number of e-folds of…
A scenario with two subsequent periods of inflationary expansion in the very early universe is examined. The model is based on a potential motivated by symmetries being found in field theory at high energy. For various parameter sets of the…
We emphasize the importance of effects from heavy fields on supergravity models of inflation. We study, in particular, the backreaction of stabilizer fields and geometric moduli in the presence of supersymmetry breaking. Many effects do not…
The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field and to perform a general analysis of the associated non-Gaussianities. We investigate the amplitudes and shapes of the…
We show that density perturbations seeded by the inflaton can be suppressed when having additional light degrees of freedom contributing to the production of perturbations. The inflaton fluctuations affect the light field dynamics by…
A scalar field with an exponential potential has been proposed as a model of inflation (called power-law inflation). Although it admits an exact solution, the integrability of the system has not been shown.We uncover the hidden symmetries…
Within the framework of a five-dimensional brane world with a stabilized radion, we compute the cosmological perturbations generated during inflation and show that the perturbations are a powerful tool to probe the physics of extra…
We study primordial perturbations from hyperinflation, proposed recently and based on a hyperbolic field-space. In the previous work, it was shown that the field-space angular momentum supported by the negative curvature modifies the…
We study the dynamics and perturbations during inflation and reheating in a multi-field model where a second scalar field $\chi$ is nonminimally coupled to the scalar curvature $(\frac12 \xi R\chi^2$). When $\xi$ is positive, the usual…
We consider two kinds of higher dimensional models which upon dimensional reduction lead to Jordan-Brans-Dicke type effective actions in four dimensions with the scale factor of the extra dimensions playing the role of the JBD field. These…
We consider small-field models which invoke the usual framework for the effective field theory, and large-field models which go beyond that. Present and future possibilities for discriminating between the models are assessed, on the…
In this master thesis we study multi-field inflation and the UV sensitivity of certain models of inflation in supergravity. We first introduce inflation and its current observational status. Then we provide an overview of studies of…
We study the parametric amplification of super-Hubble-scale scalar metric fluctuations at the end of inflation in some specific two-field models of inflation, a class of which is motivated by hybrid inflation. We demonstrate that there can…
A unified approach to quintessence and inflation is investigated with the use of a single scalar field. It is argued that successful potentials have to approximate a combination of exponential and inverse power-law decline in the limit of…