Related papers: Infrared Logarithms in Minisuperspace Inflation
The temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background observed by COBE provide strong support for an inflationary phase in the early universe, below the GUT scale. We argue that a singlet field in a hidden sector of an effective…
The conventional slow-roll approximation is broken in the so-called "ultra slow-roll" models of inflation, for which the inflaton potential is exactly (or extremely) flat. The interesting nature of (canonical) ultra slow-roll inflation is…
In a recent paper [17], we studied the evolution of the background geometry and scalar perturbations in an inflationary, spatially closed Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) model having constant positive spatial curvature and…
Cosmological local observables are at best statistically determined by the fundamental theory describing inflation. When the scalar inflaton is coupled uniformly to a collection of subdominant massless gauge vectors, rotational invariance…
It is known that infrared (IR) quantum fluctuations in de Sitter space could break the de Sitter symmetry and generate time dependent observable effects. In this paper, we consider a dilaton-gravity theory. We find that gravitational IR…
In this paper, we study inflation in the framework of the nonrelativistic general covariant theory of the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity with the projectability condition and an arbitrary coupling constant $\lambda$. We find that the…
The linear and quadratic perturbations for a scalar-tensor model with non-minimal coupling to curvature, coupling to the Gauss-Bonnet invariant and non-minimal kinetic coupling to the Einstein tensor are developed. The quadratic action for…
The celebrated Weinberg theorem in cosmological perturbation theory states that there always exist two adiabatic scalar modes in which the comoving curvature perturbation is conserved on super-horizon scales. In particular, when the…
This thesis is centered on three main subjects within the theory of inflation and cosmological perturbations: loop corrections to the power spectrum of curvature fluctuations generated during inflation; evolution of cosmological…
It is well known that, in single clock inflation, the curvature perturbation $\zeta$ is constant in time on superhorizon scales. In the standard bulk description this follows quite simply from the local conservation of the energy momentum…
The next generation of cosmological observations will be sensitive to small deviations from a pure power law in the primordial power spectrum of the curvature perturbations. In the context of slow-roll inflation, these deviations are…
We discuss the difference between various gauge-invariant quantities typically used in single-field inflation, namely synchronous $\zeta_s$, comoving $\zeta_c$, and unitary $\zeta_u$ curvatures. We show that conservation of $\zeta_c$…
We analyze a massive vector field with a non-canonical kinetic term in the action, minimally coupled to gravity, where the mass and kinetic function of the vector field vary as functions of time during inflation. The vector field is…
The calculation of scalar gravitational and matter perturbations during multiple-field inflation valid to first order in slow roll is discussed. These fields may be the coordinates of a non-trivial field manifold and hence have non-minimal…
We show how the primordial bispectrum of density perturbations from inflation may be characterised in terms of manifestly gauge-invariant cosmological perturbations at second order. The primordial metric perturbation, zeta, describing the…
We calculate IR divergent graviton one-loop corrections to scalar correlators in de Sitter space, and show that the leading IR contribution may be reproduced via simple semiclassical consistency relations. One can likewise use such…
The tensor fraction $r\simeq 0.16$ found by BICEP2 corresponds to a Hubble parameter $H\simeq 1.0\times 10^{14}\GeV$ during inflation. This has two implications for the (single-field) slow-roll inflation hypothesis. First, the inflaton…
We show that a moduli space of the form predicted by string theory, lifted by supersymmetry breaking, gives rise to successful inflation for large regions of parameter space without any modification or fine tuning. This natural realization…
Several conserved and/or gauge invariant quantities described as the second-order curvature perturbation have been given in the literature. We revisit various scenarios for the generation of second-order non-gaussianity in the primordial…
Inflation can be supported in very steep potentials if it is generated by rapidly turning fields, which can be natural in negatively curved field spaces. The curvature perturbation, $\zeta$, of these models undergoes an exponential,…