Related papers: How to Produce an Arbitrarily Small Tensor to Scal…
We study the possibility that inflation is driven by a scalar field together with a vector field minimally coupled to gravity. By assuming an effective potential that incorporates both fields into the action, we explore two distinct…
Solid inflation is a cosmological model where inflation is driven by fields which enter the Lagrangian in the same way as body coordinates of a solid matter enter the equation of state, spontaneously breaking spatial translational and…
The tensor to scalar ratio is affected by the evolution of the large-scale gauge fields potentially amplified during an inflationary stage of expansion. After deriving the exact evolution equations for the scalar and tensor modes of the…
We determine the frequency of regions of small-field inflation in the Wigner landscape as an approximation to random supergravities/type IIB flux compactifications. We show that small-field inflation occurs exponentially more often than…
There are large classes of inflationary models, particularly popular in the context of string theory and brane world approaches to inflation, in which the ratio of linearized tensor to scalar metric fluctuations is very small. In such…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…
We propose a test of single-scalar inflation based on using the well-measured scalar power spectrum to reconstruct the tensor power spectrum, up to a single integration constant. Our test is a sort of integrated version of the single-scalar…
Future observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization are expected to set an improved upper bound on the tensor-to-scalar ratio of $r\lesssim 0.03$. Recently, we showed that small field models of inflation can produce a…
We discuss inflation in models with large extra dimensions, driven by a bulk scalar field. The brane inflaton is then a single effective field, obtained from the bulk scalar field by scaling. The self interaction terms of the effective…
In inflationary scenarios with more than one scalar field, inflation may proceed even if each of the individual fields has a potential too steep for that field to sustain inflation on its own. We show that scalar fields with exponential…
We propose a new approach to investigate inflation in a model-independent way, and in particular to elaborate the involved observables, through the introduction of the "scale factor potential". Through its use one can immediately determine…
It is generally believed that in single-field slow-roll inflation, a large tensor-to-scalar ratio $r > 0.1$ requires inflaton field values close to or above the Planck scale. Recently, it has been claimed that $r > 0.15$ can be achieved…
For the inflaton perturbations it is shown that the evolution of the difference between the spectral indices can be translated into information on the scale dependence of the tensor to scalar amplitudes ratio, $r$, and how the scalar field…
We study the possible range of the tilt $n_s$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ in multifield versions of a class of inflationary models from string theory. We show that $r$ is the same between the single field models and multifield models…
We have constructed a large field N-flation model in the supergravity framework. In this simple set-up, N fields collectively drive inflation where each field traverses sub-Planckian field values. This has been realised with a…
The scenario of the slow-roll inflation is studied in the frame of the scalar-tensor theory of gravity where the scalar field has a non-minimal coupling to the geometric part. After deriving the main dynamical and perturbation equations,…
We present the general discussion on the inflection point inflation with small or large inflaton fields and show the effects of reheating dynamics on the inflationary predictions. In order to compare the model predictions with precisely…
Recently, it was proposed that a small true vacuum universe can inflate spontaneously, in principle. Furthermore, there should be matter creation in vacuum inflation due to quantum fluctuations, and the matter created will influence the…
We re-examine large scalar fields within effective field theory, in particular focussing on the issues raised by their use in inflationary models (as suggested by BICEP2 to obtain primordial tensor modes). We argue that when the large-field…
In this paper, we explore the equivalence between two theories, namely f(R) and scalar-tensor theories of gravity. We use this equivalence to explore several f(R) toy models focusing on the inflation epoch of the early universe. The study…