Related papers: Relaxing the Cosmological Moduli Problem by Low-sc…
We obtain cosmological constraints on models of inflation which exhibit rapid roll solutions. Rapid roll attractors exist for potentials with large mass terms and are thus of interest for inflationary model building within string theory. We…
When Inflation is embedded in a fundamental theory, such as string theory, it typically begins when the Universe is already substantially larger than the fundamental scale [such as the one defined by the string length scale]. This is…
We conduct a systematic search for a viable string/M-theory cosmology, focusing on cosmologies that include an era of slow-roll inflation, after which the moduli are stabilized and the Universe is in a state with an acceptably small…
The end of inflation is connected to the standard cosmological scenario through reheating. During reheating, the inflaton oscillates around the minimum of the potential and thus decays into the daughter particles that populate the Universe…
Light scalar and pseudoscalar particles are compelling dark matter candidates, with a vast running experimental program to discover them. Previous studies have shown that these light fields can generate sizable isocurvature perturbations in…
Natural inflation relies on the existence of an axion decay constant which is super-Planckian. In string theory only sub-Planckian axion decay constants have been found in any controlled regime. However in field theory it is possible to…
We reconsider the problems of cosmological inflation in effective supergravity theories. A singlet field in a hidden sector is demonstrated to yield an acceptable inflationary potential, without fine tuning. In the simplest such model, the…
An important unsolved problem that affects practically all attempts to connect string theory to cosmology and phenomenology is how to distinguish effective field theories belonging to the string landscape from those that are not consistent…
Cosmological evolution of axionic strings is investigated by numerically solving field equations of a complex scalar field in 3+1 dimensions. It is shown that the global strings relax to the scaling solution with a significantly smaller…
We present an overview of inflationary models derived from string theory focusing mostly on closed string moduli as inflatons. After a detailed discussion of the eta-problem and different approaches to address it, we describe possible ways…
We describe a scenario for inflation in the framework of non-critical string theory, which does not employ an inflaton field. There is an exponential expansion of the volume of the Universe, induced by enormous entropy production in the…
Cosmological inflation and topological defects have been considered for a long time, either in disagreement or in competition. On the one hand an inflationary era is required to solve the shortcomings of the hot big bang model, while on the…
We show that the hybrid inflation is naturally realized in the framework of a supersymmetric axion model, which is consistent with the WMAP observation if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking scale is around 10^{15}GeV. By solving the post…
We study minimal versions of Higgs inflation in the presence of a massless QCD axion. While the inflationary energy scale of the metric variant is too high to accommodate isocurvature bounds, it was argued that Palatini Higgs inflation…
We revisit the isocurvature density perturbations induced by quantum fluctuations of the axion field by extending a recently developed analytic method and approximations to a time-dependent scalar potential, which enables us to follow the…
We show that in a large volume scenario of type IIB string or F-theory compactifications, single thermal inflation provides only a partial solution to the cosmological problem of the light volume modulus. We then clarify the conditions for…
In many moduli stabilization schemes in string theory, the scale of inflation appears to be of the same order as the scale of supersymmetry breaking. For low-scale supersymmetry breaking, therefore, the scale of inflation should also be…
Inflationary string cosmology backgrounds can amplify perturbations in a more efficient way than conventional inflationary backgrounds, because the perturbation amplitude may grow - instead of being constant - outside the horizon. If not…
We study the dynamics of the standard model Higgs field in the inflationary cosmology. Since metastability of our vacuum is indicated by the current experimental data of the Higgs boson and top quark, inflation models with a large Hubble…
We explore the cosmological sensitivity to the amplitude of isocurvature fluctuations that would be caused by axions in the "anthropic window" where the axion decay constant f_a >> 10^12 GeV and the initial misalignment angle Theta_i << 1.…