Related papers: Reconstructing the Inflationary Landscape with Cos…
We perform a detailed analysis on a primordial gravitational-wave background amplified during a Kasner-like pre-inflationary phase allowing for general triaxial anisotropies. It is found that the predicted angular distribution map of…
The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…
We propose a new model-independent mechanism for producing primordial black holes from a period of multi-field inflation. This requires an enhancement of primordial fluctuations at short scales compared to their value at CMB scales. We show…
We explore extensions of hybrid inflationary models in the context of supersymmetric D-term inflation. We point out that a large variety of inflationary scenarios can be encountered when the field content is extended. It is not only…
Inflation predicts that quantum fluctuations determine the large scale structure of the Universe. This raises the striking possibility that quantum mechanics, developed to describe nature at short distances, can be tested by studying nature…
We show how estimates of parameters characterizing inflation-based theories of structure formation localized over the past year when large scale structure (LSS) information from galaxy and cluster surveys was combined with the rapidly…
There have been persistent suggestions, based on several diverse data sets, that the cosmic expansion is not exactly isotropic. It is not easy to develop a coherent theoretical account of such a ``Hubble anisotropy'', for, in standard…
Single field inflationary models predict nearly Gaussian initial conditions and hence a detection of non-Gaussianity would be a signature of the more complex inflationary scenarios. In this paper we study the effect on the cosmic microwave…
We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The…
Cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy may result from both scalar and tensor perturbations. For a sufficiently narrow range of angular scales, CMB perturbations can be characterized by four parameters. Results from the Cosmic…
We perform a Bayesian analysis to study possible features in the primordial inflationary power spectrum of scalar perturbations. In particular, we analyse the possibility of detecting the imprint of these primordial features in the…
The recent data from the Boomerang and MAXIMA-1 balloon flights have marked the beginning of the precision era of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy (CMB) measurements. We investigate the observational constraints from the current CMB…
The curl-modes of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization probe horizon-scale primordial gravitational waves related to inflation. A significant source of confusion is expected from a lensing conversion of polarization related to…
Based on the conventional metric tensor and driven by a nearly constant energy density, cosmic inflation, characterized by a remarkably accelerated expansion, was proposed as an early epoch in the Universe. The energy density is typically…
The isotropy and homogeneity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) favors "scalar driven" early Universe inflationary models. Non-scalar fields, and in particular gauge fields, are on the other hand commonplace in all high energy…
The primordial bispectrum has been considered in the past decade as a powerful probe of the physical processes taking place in the early Universe. Within the inflationary paradigm, the properties of the bispectrum are one of the keys that…
We derive an expression for the non-Gaussian cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) statistic $I_l^3$ defined recently by Ferreira, Magueijo, and G\'orski in terms of the slow-roll-inflation parameters $\epsilon$ and $\eta$. This result shows…
We revisit an inflationary scenario in which primordial inhomogeneities arise from a quantum collapse, a stochastic mechanism described in the context of quantum collapse theories in its continuous version and within semiclassical gravity.…
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 argue that the anomalous power asymmetry observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) may have originated in a cosmic bounce preceding inflation. In loop quantum cosmology (LQC) the big bang singularity is generically replaced by a…