Related papers: Natural Inflation from Polymer Quantization
Quantum field theory in curved spacetimes suffers in general from an infinite ambiguity in the choice of Fock representation and associated vacuum. In cosmological backgrounds, the requirement of a unitary implementation of the field…
Hybrid inflation is a natural scenario in the absence of supersymmetry. In the context of supergravity, however, it has to face the naturalness problems of the initial conditions and of the adequate suppression of the inflaton mass. Both…
The polymer quantization of matter fields is a diffeomorphism invariant framework compatible with Loop Quantum Gravity. Whereas studied by itself, it is not explic- itly used in the known completely quantizable models of matter coupled to…
Until recently our knowledge of the primordial curvature perturbation was relatively modest. Ever since COBE delivered its map of data we know the scalar spectrum of primordial perturbations is approximately flat, with the power being only…
We study multifield contributions to the scalar power spectrum in an ensemble of six-field inflationary models obtained in string theory. We identify examples in which inflation occurs by chance, near an approximate inflection point, and we…
The very early universe provides the best arena we currently have to test quantum gravity theories. The success of the inflationary paradigm in accounting for the observed inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background already…
We investigate a particle physics model for cosmic inflation based on the following assumptions: (i) there are at least two complex scalar fields; (ii) the scalar potential is bounded from below and remains perturbative up to the Planck…
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…
We present the detailed analyses of five-dimensional loop quantum Kaluza-Klein cosmology based on the symmetric reduction of the connection formulation of the full theory. The previous results in a particular scenario are extended to more…
Quintessential inflation unifies inflation and late time acceleration by a single scalar field. Such a scenario, with canonical and non-canonical scalar fields, has been discussed . The scalar field behaves as an inflaton field during…
The situation that a scalar field provides the source of the accelerated expansion of the universe while rolling down its potential is common in both the simple models of the primordial inflation and the quintessence-based dark energy…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
The quantum gravitational scale of inflation is calculated by finding a sharp probability peak in the distribution function of chaotic inflationary cosmologies driven by a scalar field with large negative constant $\xi$ of nonminimal…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
We revisit the issue on signatures of pre-inflationary background anisotropy by considering the quantization of a massless and minimally coupled scalar field in an axially symmetric Kasner background, mimicking cosmological perturbations.…
In scale-invariant models of fundamental physics, mass scales are generated by spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this work, we study inflation in scale-invariant $R^2$ gravity, in which the Planck mass is generated by a scalar field, which…
Some recent studies based on numerical relativity simulations claim that slow contraction/ekpyrosis is strongly preferred over inflation as the smoothing mechanism that brought the universe into the homogeneous, isotropic and flat state we…
Non-perturbative corrections from loop quantum cosmology (LQC) to the scalar matter sector is already known to imply inflation. We prove that the LQC modified scalar field generates exponential inflation in the small scale factor regime,…
A new class of gravity-matter model defined with an independent non-Riemannian volume form is studied, in the second order formalism. The action has a global scale invariance symmetry, which can be broken by the equation of motion of the…
We introduce a numerical method specifically designed for investigating generic multifield models of inflation where a number of scalar fields $\phi^K$ are minimally coupled to gravity and live in a field space with a non-trivial metric…