Related papers: Hyperinflation
In order to draw out the essential behavior of the universe, investigations of early universe cosmology often reduce the complex system to a simple integrable system. Inflationary models are of this kind as they focus on simple scalar field…
Supersymmetric hybrid inflation is an exquisite framework to connect inflationary cosmology to particle physics at the scale of grand unification. Ending in a phase transition associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, it can naturally…
While moving down the potential on its classical slow roll trajectory, the inflaton field is subject to quantum jumps, which take it up or down the potential at random. In "stochastic inflation", the impact of these quantum jumps is modeled…
Cosmological inflation, if it occurred, radically alters the picture of the `big bang', which would merely point to reheating at the end of inflation. Moreover, this reheating may be only local, so that inflation continues elsewhere and…
Inflationary models, especially those with plateau-type potentials, are consistent with the cosmological data, but inflation itself does not resolve the initial singularity. This singularity is resolved, for example, by the idea of the…
We show that it is possible to realize an inflationary scenario even without conversion of the false vacuum energy to radiation. Such cosmological models have a deflationary stage in which $Ha^2$ is decreasing and radiation produced by…
Bulk viscosity leads to negative pressure, which is a key ingredient for successful inflation. We build an inflationary model where the slow-roll of the inflaton field is driven by a viscous component instead of the flat potential commonly…
We develop a quantum-cosmological framework in which the inflationary potential emerges from the structure of the wave function of the universe rather than being postulated. Starting from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation for a flat…
Using the techniques of out-of-equilibrium field theory, we study the influence on the properties of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation on observable scales coming from fluctuations corresponding today to scales much…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
We consider cosmological perturbations caused by modulated inflaton velocity. During inflation, the inflaton motion is damped and the velocity is determined by the parameters such as couplings or masses that may depend on light…
Warm inflation is an interesting possibility of describing the early universe, whose basic feature is the absence, at least in principle, of a preheating or reheating phase. Here we analyze the dynamics of warm inflation generalizing the…
Out-of-equilibrium, non-perturbative, quantum effects significantly modify the standard picture of inflation in a wide class of models including new, natural, and hybrid inflation. We find that the quantum evolution of a single real…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
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…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
Though predictions of the simplest inflationary cosmological models with cold dark matter, flat space and approximately flat initial spectrum of adiabatic perturbations are remarkably close to observational data, we have to go beyond them…
We consider an inflationary scenario where the rate of inflaton roll defined by $\ddot\phi/H\dot \phi$ remains constant. The rate of roll is small for slow-roll inflation, while a generic rate of roll leads to the interesting case of…
We calculate the power spectrum of adiabatic density perturbations in an open inflationary model in which inflation occurs in two stages. First an epoch of old inflation creates a large, smooth universe, solving the horizon and homogeneity…