Related papers: A case for kinetically dominated initial condition…
The behavior of the quintessence field is studied during inflation. In order to have a satisfactory model of dark energy, the quintessence field value today should be as insensible to the initial conditions as possible. Usually, only the…
If the inflaton and the quintessence fields are identified, the background geometry evolves through a stiff epoch undershooting the expansion rate of a radiation-dominated plasma. For some classes of inflationary potentials this scenario is…
We present a model with a complex and a real scalar fields and a potential whose symmetry is explicitly broken by Planck-scale physics. For exponentially small breaking, the model accounts for the period of inflation in the early universe…
Studies of the initial conditions for inflation have conflicting predictions from exponential suppression to inevitability. At the level of phase space, this conflict arises from the competing intuitions of CPT invariance and…
Trapped inflation is a mechanism in which particle production from the moving inflaton is the main source of friction in the inflaton equation of motion. The produced fields source inflaton perturbations, which dominate over the vacuum…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
The amplitude of primordial curvature perturbations is enhanced when a radiation bath at a temperature T>H is sustained during inflation by dissipative particle production, which is particularly significant when a non-trivial statistical…
The weak gravity conjecture applied for the aligned natural inflation indicates that generically there can be a modulation of the inflaton potential, with a period determined by sub-Planckian axion scale. We study the oscillations in the…
Some recent studies based on numerical relativity simulations claim that slow contraction/ekpyrosis is strongly preferred over inflation as the smoothing mechanism that brought the universe into the homogeneous, isotropic and flat state we…
We investigate a nonsingular initial state of the Universe which leads to inflation naturally. The model is described by a scalar field with a quadratic potential in Eddington-inspired Born-Infeld gravity. The curvature of this initial…
A new family of inflation models is introduced and studied. The models are characterised by a scalar potential which, far from the origin, approaches an inflationary plateau in a power-law manner, while near the origin becomes monomial, as…
In hybrid inflation models, typically only a tiny fraction of possible initial conditions give rise to successful inflation, even if one assumes spatial homogeneity. We analyze some possible solutions to this initial conditions problem,…
After the release of the PLANCK data, it is evident that inflationary paradigm has stood the test of time. Even though, it is difficult to realise inflationary paradigm in a particle physics model as the present observations have ruled out…
Planck data has not found the 'smoking gun' of non-Gaussianity that would have necessitated consideration of inflationary models beyond the simplest canonical single field scenarios. This raises the important question of what these results…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
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…
Attention has been recently drawn towards models in which inflation and quintessence schemes are unified. In such `quintessential inflation' models, a unique scalar field is required to play both the role of the inflaton and of the…
Within General Relativity, a minimally coupled scalar field governed by a quadratic potential is able to produce an accelerated expansion of the universe provided its value and excursion are larger than the Planck scale. This is an…
We show that the quadratic inflation can be realized by the phase of a complex field with helicoid potential. Remarkably, this helicoid potential can be simply realized in minimal supergravity. The global $U(1)$ symmetry of the K\"ahler…
We consider small-field models which invoke the usual framework for the effective field theory, and large-field models which go beyond that. Present and future possibilities for discriminating between the models are assessed, on the…