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A new class of inflationary attractors characterized by a strongly non-geodesic motion has been discovered and explored in the past few years. I describe how they naturally arise in negatively curved field space, allowing to inflate on…
We consider the stability of a system of equations which are a singular perturbation of the incompressible rigid-plastic flow equations used to model granular flow. A linear stability analysis shows that solutions of these equations are…
The Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model has several flat directions, which can naturally be excited during inflation. If they have a slow (perturbative) decay, they may affect the thermalization of the inflaton decay products. In the…
It has been argued that supersymmetric microstate geometries are classically unstable. One argument for instability involves considering the motion of a massive particle near the ergosurface of such a spacetime. It is shown that the…
We explore the dynamics of multi-field models of inflation in which the field-space metric is a hyperbolic manifold of constant curvature. Such models are known as $\alpha$-attractors and their single-field regimes have been extensively…
We perform a general algebraic analysis on the possibility of realising slow-roll inflation in the moduli sector of string models. This problem turns out to be very closely related to the characterisation of models admitting metastable…
High-energy physics often motivates multi-field inflationary scenarios where stochastic effects play a crucial role. Peculiar to multi-field models, the noise-induced centrifugal force results in a longer duration of inflation depending on…
A sufficiently rigid relativistic elastic solid can be stable for negative pressure values and thus is capable of driving a stage of accelerated expansion. If a relativistic elastic solid drove an inflationary stage in the early Universe,…
We study the dynamics of a homogeneous, isotropic, and positively curved universe in the presence of a SU(2) gauge field or a triplet of mutually orthogonal vector fields. In the SU(2) case we use the previously known ansatz for the…
We consider the model of modified gravity with dynamical torsion. This model was found to have promising stability properties about various backgrounds. The model admits a self-accelerating solution. We have shown previously that if the…
It is well known that large Hubble-induced supergravity corrections to the inflaton field can ruin the flatness of the potential, thus creating a tension between slow-roll inflation and supergravity. In this paper we show that it is…
We consider the effects of inhomogeneous initial conditions in both the scalar field profile and the extrinsic curvature on different inflationary models. In particular, we compare the robustness of small field inflation to that of large…
We examine a wide class of multi-field inflationary models based on fields that decay or stabilize during inflation in a staggered fashion. The fields driving assisted inflation are on flat, short stretches, before they encounter a sharp…
We consider a universe in which inflation commences because of a positive cosmological constant, the effect of which is progressively screened by the interaction between virtual gravitons that become trapped in the expansion of spacetime.…
We investigate linear cosmological perturbations in multiple field inflationary models where some of the directions are light while others are heavy (with respect to the Hubble parameter). By integrating out the massive degrees of freedom,…
We consider inflation driven near a saddle point in a higher dimensional field space, which is the most likely type of slow roll inflation on the string theoretical landscape; anthropic arguments need to be invoked in order to find 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,…
In this brief note we present a set of equations describing the evolution of perturbed scalar fields in a cosmological spacetime with multiple scalar fields. We take into account of the simultaneously excited full metric perturbations in…
It is investigated whether a massive Abelian vector field, whose gauge kinetic function is growing during inflation, can be responsible for the generation of the curvature perturbation in the Universe. Particle production is studied and it…
We consider the minimally coupled 3-form field which has been considered as a candidate to realize inflation. We have studied the conditions to avoid ghosts and Laplacian instabilities and found that some classes of potentials, e.g. the…