Related papers: Constraints on the radiation temperature before in…
We discuss the inflationary paradigm, how it can be tested, and how various models of inflation fare in the light of data from Planck and BICEP2. We introduce inflation and reheating, and discuss temperature and polarisation anisotropies in…
These lecture notes provide an introduction to cosmic inflation. In particular I will review the basic concepts of inflation, generation of density perturbations, and reheating after inflation.
In cosmological scenarios with thermal inflation, extra eras of moduli matter domination, thermal inflation and flaton matter domination exist between primordial inflation and the radiation domination of Big Bang nucleosynthesis. During…
We propose a scenario of the beginning of inflation in which the non-vacuum value of the scalar field that drives inflation develops dynamically due to the non-minimal coupling to gravity. In this scenario, inflation emerges as an…
The recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) can be used to constrain the energy scale of inflation. The conclusions however depend on the assumptions about post-inflationary history of the Universe. E.g. in the…
The reheating temperature plays a crucial role in the early universe's evolution, marking the transition from inflation to the radiation-dominated era. It directly impacts the number of $e$-folds and, consequently, the observable parameters…
We present the implications for cosmic inflation of the Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in both temperature and polarization based on the full Planck survey. The Planck full mission temperature data…
We study the constraint on the inflationary energy scale from the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC). We find a universal upper bound on the inflationary Hubble expansion rate $H_\text{inf}$ which is solely…
The mechanism of thermal inflation, a relatively short period of accelerated expansion after primordial inflation, is a desirable ingredient for a certain class of particle physics models if they are not to be in contention with the…
The characteristics of the cosmic microwave background provide circumstantial evidence that the hot radiation-dominated epoch in the early universe was preceded by a period of inflationary expansion. Here, we show how a measurement of the…
Reheating connects the inflationary universe to the radiation-dominated evolution of standard Big Bang cosmology. Due to the lack of direct observations, we rely on indirect bounds on this phase from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)…
One of the fundamental problems of modern cosmology is to explain the origin of all the matter and radiation in the Universe today. The inflationary model predicts that the oscillations of the scalar field at the end of inflation will…
We present a model of inflation where the inflaton is accommodated as a phantom field which exhibits an initial transient pole behavior and then decays into a quintessence field which is responsible for a radiation era. We must stress that…
Thermal inflation is a second epoch of exponential expansion at typical energy scales $V^{1/4} \sim 10^{6 \sim 8} \mathrm{GeV}$. If the usual primordial inflation is followed by thermal inflation, the primordial power spectrum is only…
If the spatial curvature of the universe is positive, then the curvature term will always dominate at early enough times in a slow-rolling inflationary epoch. This enhances inflationary effects and hence puts limits on the possible number…
If the initial state of the inflaton field is taken to have a thermal distribution instead of the conventional zero particle vacuum state then the curvature power spectrum gets modified by a temperature dependent factor such that the…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
It is argued that the entropy bound places an upper limit of about 1 TeV on the temperature of the last reheating era in the early Universe. Implications for inflation and non-standard paradigms for beyond the standard model of hot…
We study the implications of the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) for early universe cosmology and in particular inflationary cosmology. The TCC leads to the conclusion that if we want inflationary cosmology to…
Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density…