Related papers: Partially Massless Fields During Inflation
We show that models of new particle physics containing massless pseudoscalar fields super-weakly coupled to photons can be very efficiently probed with CMB polarization anisotropies. The stochastic pseudoscalar fluctuations generated during…
We study the mixed scalar-tensor two-point function in icosahedral inflation. Within the regime of validity of the effective field theory, this has to be perturbatively small; in particular, much smaller than the scalar spectrum. However,…
Transforming canonical scalars to the Einstein frame can give a multi-field generalization of pole inflation (namely, a scalar with a divergent kinetic term) at vanishing field-dependent Planck mass. However, to obtain an attractor, the…
This paper investigates Starobinsky's model of inflation driven by the trace anomaly of conformally coupled matter fields. This model does not suffer from the problem of contrived initial conditions that occurs in most models of inflation…
We describe a new mechanism that gives rise to dissipation during cosmic inflation. In the simplest implementation, the mechanism requires the presence of a massive scalar field with a softly-broken global $U(1)$ symmetry, along with the…
A calculation of the one-mode occupation numbers for vacuum fluctuations of massive fields in De Sitter space shows that their use for the generation of classical density perturbations in inflationary cosmology very much depends on their…
Slow-roll inflation is studied in theories where the inflaton field is conformally coupled to the Ricci scalar. In particular, the case of Higgs field inflation in the context of the noncommutative spectral action is analyzed. It is shown…
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…
We investigate the dynamics of the recently proposed model of assisted inflation. In this model an arbitrary number of scalar fields with exponential potentials evolve towards an inflationary scaling solution, even if each of the individual…
We compute the covariant three-point function near horizon-crossing for a system of slowly-rolling scalar fields during an inflationary epoch, allowing for an arbitrary field-space metric. We show explicitly how to compute its subsequent…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
We consider light scalar fields during inflation and show how the stochastic spectral expansion method can be used to calculate two-point correlation functions of an arbitrary local function of the field in de Sitter space. In particular,…
We propose a new scenario for early cosmology, where an inflationary de Sitter phase is obtained with a ghost condensate. The transition to radiation dominance is triggered by the ghost itself, without any slow-roll potential. Density…
Since inflationary perturbations must generically couple to all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe, it is more realistic to view these fluctuations as an open quantum system interacting with an environment. Then, on very…
We investigate the Lyth relationship between the tensor-scalar ratio, r, and the variation of the inflaton field, Delta phi, over the course of inflation. For inflationary models that produce at least 55 e-folds of inflation, there is a…
For the first time, we investigate the non-perturbative dynamics of single field inflation with a departure from slow-roll. Using simulations, we find that oscillatory features in the potential can drastically alter the course of inflation,…
We analyze the behavior of linear perturbations in vector inflation. In contrast to the scalar field inflation, the linearized theory with vector fields contains couplings between scalar, vector and tensor modes. The perturbations decouple…
We derive a set of no-go theorems and yes-go examples for the parity-odd primordial trispectrum of curvature perturbations. We work at tree-level in the decoupling limit of the Effective Field Theory of Inflation and assume scale invariance…
We investigate the possibility that the amplitude of scalar density perturbations may be damped after inflation. This would imply that CMB anisotropies do not uniquely fix the amplitude of the perturbations generated during inflation and…
We consider the possibility of extra spinning particles during inflation, focussing on the spin-2 case. Our analysis relies on the well-known fully non-linear formulation of interacting spin-2 theories. We explore the parameter space of the…