Related papers: Tracking Pre-inflation Era from density perturbati…
Slow-roll inflation generically makes several predictions: a flat Universe, primordial adiabatic density perturbations, and a stochastic gravity-wave background. Each inflation model will further predict specific relations between the…
We explore the possibility of a single field quasi-de Sitter inflationary model with general initial state for primordial fluctuations. In this paper, first we compute the power spectrum and the bispectrum of scalar perturbations with…
Cosmic inflation provides a window to the highest energy densities accessible in nature, far beyond those achievable in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Theoretical insights into the inflationary era and its observational probes may…
The physics of de Sitter space is essential to our understanding of our cosmological past, present, and future. It forms the foundation for the statistical predictions of inflation in terms of quantum vacuum fluctuations that are being…
Since inflationary perturbations must generically couple to all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe, it is more realistic to view these fluctuations as an open quantum system interacting with an environment. Then, on very…
We analyse numerically the onset of pre-big bang inflation in an inhomogeneous, spherically symmetric Universe. Adding a small dilatonic perturbation to a trivial (Milne) background, we find that suitable regions of space undergo…
In this work we study the imprints of bubble nucleation on primordial inflationary perturbations. We assume that the bubble is formed via the tunneling of a spectator field from the false vacuum of its potential to its true vacuum. We…
The physics of the inflationary universe requires the study of the out of equilibrium evolution of quantum fields in curved spacetime. We present the evolution for both the geometry and the matter (described by the quantum inflaton field)…
I discuss how parameters describing inflation in the very early universe may be related to primordial perturbation spectra. Precision observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) such as those provided by the WMAP…
If inflation was preceded by a radiation era then at the time of inflation there will exist a decoupled thermal distribution of gravitons. Gravitational waves generated during inflation will be amplified by the process of stimulated…
We present an explicit cosmological model where inflation and dark energy both could arise from the dynamics of the same scalar field. We present our discussion in the framework where the inflaton field $\phi$ attains a nearly constant…
If local supersymmetry is the correct extension of the standard model of particle physics, then following Inflation the early universe would have been populated by gravitinos produced from scatterings in the hot plasma during reheating.…
There are several works searching for a clue of trans-Planckian physics on the primordial density perturbation spectrum. Here we would like to point out an important aspect which has been overlooked so far. When we consider a model in which…
In the context of loop quantum cosmology, we consider an inflationary era driven by a canonical scalar field and occurring in the semiclassical regime, where spacetime is a continuum but quantum gravitational effects are important. The…
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…
We determine the frequency of regions of small-field inflation in the Wigner landscape as an approximation to random supergravities/type IIB flux compactifications. We show that small-field inflation occurs exponentially more often than…
During inflation, primordial energy density fluctuations are created from approximate de Sitter vacuum quantum fluctuations redshifted out of the horizon after which they are frozen as perturbations in the background curvature. In this…
Starting from an initial state of thermal equilibrium, we derive an expression for the quantum fluctuation in the energy density during the inflationary epoch in terms of the mode functions for the inflaton field. The effect of this…
The observational constraints on the primordial power spectrum have tightened considerably with the release of the first year analysis of the WMAP observations, especially when combined with the results from other CMB experiments and galaxy…
Detailed analyses of the WMAP data indicate possible oscillatory features in the primordial curvature perturbation, which moreover appears to be suppressed beyond the present Hubble radius. Such deviations from the usual inflationary…