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We consider a new inflationary model in which an antisymmetric tensor field $A_{\nu\rho\sigma}$ and its four-form field strength $F_{\mu\nu\rho\sigma}=4\partial_{[\mu} A_{\nu\rho\sigma]}$ are coupled to the scalar sector of the standard…
We investigate the effects of large inhomogeneities in both the inflaton field and its momentum. We find that in general, large kinetic perturbations reduce the number of e-folds of inflation. In particular, we observe that inflationary…
We show that simple strongly coupled supersymmetric gauge theories with quantum moduli spaces can naturally lead to hybrid inflation. These theories contain no input dimensionful or small parameters. The effective superpotential is linear…
We study models of modular inflation of the form expected to arise from low energy effective actions of superstring theories. We argue on general grounds that the most likely models of modular slow-roll inflation are small field models in…
We apply the effective field theory approach to quasi-single field inflation, which contains an additional scalar field with Hubble scale mass other than inflaton. Based on the time-dependent spatial diffeomorphism, which is not broken by…
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…
The BICEP2 observation of a large tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r = 0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$, implies that the inflaton $\phi$ in single-field inflation models must satisfy $\phi \sim 10M_{Pl}$ in order to produce sufficient inflation. This is a…
We construct models of inflation with many randomly interacting fields and use these to study the generation of cosmological observables. We model the potentials as multi-dimensional Gaussian random fields (GRFs) and identify powerful…
The effective approach is applied to the analysis of inflationary magnetogenesis. Rather than assuming a particular underlying description, all the generally covariant terms potentially appearing with four space-time derivatives in the…
We study D-brane inflation in a warped conifold background that includes brane-position dependent corrections for the nonperturbative superpotential. Instead of stabilizing the volume modulus chi at instantaneous minima of the potential and…
This is a version of the author's Ph.D. thesis. The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field and to perform a general analysis of the associated non-Gaussianities. We…
We compute the tensor and scalar spectral index $n_t$, $n_s$, the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$, the consistency relation $n_t/r$ in the general monomial multifield slow-roll inflation models with potentials $V \sim\sum_i\lambda_i…
We report first study of complex field inflation. Although understood as a specific two-field inflation, a complex field inflation is able to make more robust model predictions on primordial curvature perturbation. Explicitly we discuss the…
We find a general model of {\em single-field} inflation within the context of type IIB string theory compactified on large volume Calabi-Yau orientifolds with $h^{2,1} > h^{1,1} = 2$. The inflaton is the axion part of the complexified…
In this work we investigate a inflationary scenario generated by a large scalar field $\phi$ that non-minimally couples to a $f(R)$ modified gravity model. For a Starobinsky's like model, it is found that along a particular flat direction,…
We show how we can implement chaotic inflation in the context of supergravity by conveniently selecting the functional form of a strong enough non-minimal coupling between the inflaton and the Ricci scalar curvature. The procedure can be…
We consider the well motivated model of the (standard) supersymmetric F-term hybrid inflation (FHI) which can be realized close to the grand unification scale. The predicted scalar spectral index $n_s$ cannot be smaller than 0.98 and can…
We revisit perturbative unitarity in scalar field inflation with a nonminimal coupling, with Higgs inflation serving as the most prominent example. Although such models are phenomenologically successful, it is critical to examine whether or…
We study loop corrections in the effective field theory of inflation with imaginary speed of sound, which has been shown to provide an effective description of multi-field inflationary models characterized by strongly non-geodesic motion…
One of the fundamental objectives of contemporary cosmology is to understand the physics of the inflationary universe, owing to its observably verifiable predictions about the very early universe with an energy scale of $\sim 10^{16}$ GeV.…