Related papers: Fibre Inflation and $\alpha$-attractors
An inflationary stage dominated by a $D$-term avoids the slow-roll problem of inflation in supergravity and may emerge in theories with a non-anomalous or anomalous U(1) gauge symmetry. The most intriguing and commonly invoked possibility…
During inflation, the geometry of spacetime is described by a (quasi-)de Sitter phase. Inflationary observables are determined by the underlying (softly broken) de Sitter isometry group SO(1, 4) which acts like a conformal group on R^3:…
We provide a unified description of cosmological $\alpha$-attractors and late-time acceleration, in excellent agreement with the latest Planck data. Our construction involves two superfields playing distinctive roles: one is the dynamical…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
A second order pole in the scalar kinetic term can lead to a class of inflation models with universal predictions referred to as pole inflation or $\alpha$-attractors. While this kinetic structure is ubiquitous in supergravity effective…
The $\alpha$-attractor models are some of the most interesting models of inflation from the point of view of upcoming observations in cosmology and also attractive from the point of view of supergravity. We confront representative models of…
A supersymmetric inflationary stage dominated by an $F$-term has the problem that the flatness of the potential is spoiled by supergravity corrections, that is the slow-roll parameter $\eta$ gets contributions of order unity. We show that…
We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of non-critical string theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production in the…
We use a new mechanism for generating a Fayet-Iliopoulos term in supergravity, which is not associated to an R symmetry, to construct a semi-realistic theory of slow-roll inflation for a theory with the same K\"ahler potential and…
We show that a particular class of effective low energy supergravity theories motivated by string theory can provide a promising framework for models of hybrid inflation in which the potential energy which drives inflation originates from…
Starobinsky inflation is currently one of the best models concerning agreement with cosmological data. Despite this observational success, it is still lacking a robust embedding into a UV complete theory. Previous efforts to derive…
A four-dimensional universe, arising from a flux compactification of Type IIB string theory, contains scalar fields with a potential determined by topological and geometric parameters of the internal -hidden- dimensions. We show that…
Supersymmetry is the most natural framework for physics above the TeV scale, and the corresponding framework for early-Universe cosmology, including inflation, is supergravity. No-scale supergravity emerges from generic string…
We study the effective field theory of inflation, i.e. the most general theory describing the fluctuations around a quasi de Sitter background, in the case of single field models. The scalar mode can be eaten by the metric by going to…
Tribrid inflation is a class of supersymmetric inflation models where the scalar component of a matter superfield, or a $D$-flat direction of matter fields, drives inflation. Similar to Hybrid inflation, the end of inflation is reached when…
Processes of particle production during inflation can increase the amplitude of the scalar metric perturbations. We show that such a mechanism can naturally arise in supergravity models where an axion-like field, whose potential is…
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…
We develop sequestered inflation models, where inflation occurs along flat directions in supergravity models derived from type IIB string theory. It is compactified on a ${\mathbb{T}^6 \over \mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2}$ orientifold…
We consider inflation driven near a saddle point in a higher dimensional field space, which is the most likely type of slow roll inflation on the string theoretical landscape; anthropic arguments need to be invoked in order to find a…
We discuss the possibility that inflation is driven by the sgoldstino, the superpartner of the goldstino. Unlike in generic supergravity scenarios, the sgoldstino decouples from all other fields in the theory, which allows for a simple and…