Related papers: Possible Signatures of Inflationary Particle Conte…
In de Sitter spacetime there exists an absolute minimum for the mass of a spin-2 field set by the Higuchi bound m^2 \geq 2H^2. We generalize this bound to arbitrary spatially flat FRW geometries in the context of the recently proposed…
If the expansion of the early Universe was not close to de Sitter, the statistical imprints of the primordial density perturbation on the cosmic microwave background can be quite different from those derived in slow-roll inflation. In this…
We derive the general lagrangian and propagator for a vector-spinor field in $d$-dimensions and show that the physical observables are invariant under the so-called point transformation symmetry. Until now the symmetry has not been…
We study the possibility of standard model Higgs boson acting as an inflaton field in the framework of Horava-Lifshitz Gravity. Under this framework, we showed that it is possible for the Higgs field to produce right amount of inflation and…
Single scalar field inflation with a generic, non-quadratic in derivatives, field Lagrangian is considered. It is shown that non-Gaussianity of curvature perturbations is characterized by two dimensionless amplitudes. One of these…
We study how both the swampland distance conjecture and the Lyth bound affect the parameter space of multi-field models of inflation. A generic feature of multi-field inflation is that the geodesic distance…
We study $R^2$-Higgs inflation in a model with two Higgs doublets in which the Higgs sector of the Standard Model is extended by an additional Higgs doublet, thereby four scalar fields are involved in the inflationary evolutions. We first…
It is an interesting question whether low energy degrees of freedom may be responsible for early universe inflation. To examine this, here we present a simple version of Higgs-inflation with minimal coupling to gravity and a quadratic…
We propose a realisation of 'new inflation' in supergravity (SUGRA), where the flatness of the inflaton potential is protected by a Heisenberg symmetry. Inflation can be associated with a particle physics phase transition, with the inflaton…
Quantization of the free and interacting Rarita-Schwinger field is considered using the Hamiltonian path-integral formulation. The particular interaction we study in detail is the $\pi N \De$ coupling used in the phenomenology of the…
The present work suggests that the isocurvature tension between axion and high energy inflationary scenarios may be avoided by considering a double field inflationary model involving the hidden Peccei-Quinn Higgs and the Standard Model one.…
We compute the spectrum of scalar models with a general coupling to the scalar curvature. We find that the perturbative states of these theories are given by two massive spin-0 modes in addition to one massless spin-2 state. This latter…
String theory abounds with light scalar fields (the dilaton and various moduli) which create a host of observational problems, and notably some serious cosmological difficulties similar to the ones associated with the Polonyi field in the…
We consider models of chaotic inflation driven by the real parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields involved in the spontaneous breaking of a grand unification symmetry at a scale assuming its value within MSSM. We combine a…
Under the general hypotheses of locality, smoothness of interactions in the coupling constant, Poincare invariance, Lorentz covariance, and preservation of the number of derivatives on each field, we investigate the cross-couplings of one…
In this paper we revisit the formulation of scalar field theories on de Sitter backgrounds subject to the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP). The GUP arises in several contexts in string theory, but is most readily thought of as…
We consider models of a scalar field coupled to quadratic $R\!+\!R^2$ gravity in the framework of the Palatini formulation. The resulting Einstein-frame generalized $k$-inflation effective theory is analyzed assuming that the constant-roll…
We find a model-independent upper bound on the strong coupling scale for a massive spin-2 particle coupled to Einstein gravity. Our approach is to directly construct tree-level scattering amplitudes for these degrees of freedom and use them…
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…
Recently it has been suggested that non-gaussian inflationary perturbations can be usefully analysed in terms of a putative dual gauge theory defined on the future conformal infinity generated by an accelerating cosmology. The problem is…