Related papers: Avoiding instabilities in antisymmetric tensor fie…
We present a model of inflation where the inflaton is accommodated as a phantom field which exhibits an initial transient pole behavior and then decays into a quintessence field which is responsible for a radiation era. We must stress that…
Bimetric gravity theories allow for many different types of cosmological solutions, but not all of them are theoretically allowed. In this work we discuss the conditions to satisfy the Higuchi bound and to avoid gradient instabilities in…
We investigate the stability of theories in which Lorentz invariance is spontaneously broken by fixed-norm vector "aether" fields. Models with generic kinetic terms are plagued either by ghosts or by tachyons, and are therefore physically…
We systematically show that in potential driven generalized G-inflation models, quantum corrections coming from new physics at the strong coupling scale can be avoided, while producing observable tensor modes. The effective action can be…
Assuming the existence of a scalar field which undergoes "ghost condensation" and which has a suitably chosen potential, it is possible to obtain a non-singular bouncing cosmology in the presence of regular matter and radiation. The…
We disprove the widespread belief that higher order curvature theories of gravity in the metric-affine formalism are generally ghost-free. This is clarified by considering a sub-class of theories constructed only with the Ricci tensor and…
These proceedings summarise some recent efforts in understanding a class of vector-tensor theories known as {\it bumblebee} models, which spontaneously break local Lorentz and diffeomorphism invariance. Using cosmological perturbation…
Ghost inflation predicts almost scale-invariant primordial cosmological perturbations with relatively large non-Gaussianity. The bispectrum is known to have a large contribution at the wavenumbers forming an equilateral triangle and the…
Under the same spirit of the Galileon-Horndeski theories and their more modern extensions, the generalized SU(2) Proca theory was built by demanding that its action may be free of the Ostrogradski's instability. Nevertheless, the theory…
We investigate tensor modes in inflationary scenarios from the point of view of Ashtekar variables and their generalizations labelled by Immirzi parameter \gamma, which we'll assume imaginary. By defining the classical perturbed…
I review a string-inspired cosmological model, with gravitational anomalies present at very early epochs, which includes a totally antisymmetric torsion, that in (3+1)-dimensions is equivalent to a pseudoscalar (Kalb-Ramond, string-model…
Recent observations by pulsar timing arrays (PTAs) indicate a potential detection of a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background. Metastable cosmic strings have been recognized as a possible source of the observed signals. In this…
The aim of these notes is to provide a self-contained review of why it is generically a problem when a solution of a theory possesses ghost fields among the perturbation modes. We define what a ghost field is and we show that its presence…
We show how infinite derivative modifications of gravity impact on the stochastic background of Gravitational Waves from early Universe. The generic property of the ghost-free theory fixed on Minkowski space-time is the emergence of an…
Existence and stability analysis of the Kantowski-Sachs type universe in a higher derivative induced gravity theory is studied in details. Existence of one stable mode and one unstable mode is shown to be in favor of the inflationary…
We propose a novel mechanism for significantly enhancing the amplitude of primordial electromagnetic fields during inflation. Similar to existing proposals, our idea is based on parametric resonance effects due to…
Massive vector fields feature in several areas of particle physics, e.g., as carriers of weak interactions, dark matter candidates, or as an effective description of photons in a plasma. Here we investigate vector fields with…
We present a series of theoretical constraints on the potentially viable inflation models that might yield a blue spectrum for primordial tensor perturbations. By performing a detailed dynamical analysis we show that, while there exists…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
We discuss the damping of tensor modes due to anisotropic stress in inflation. The effect is negligible in standard inflation and may be significantly large in inflation models that involve drastic production of free-streaming particles.