Related papers: Homogeneous Transitions during Inflation: a Descri…
One possible description of the very early stages of the evolution of the universe is provided by Chaotic Inflationary Cosmology. For that model the role of the inflaton field is played by quantum gravitational effects. We study if such a…
We study an inflationary scenario where thermal inflation is followed by fast-roll inflation. This is a rather generic possibility based on the effective potentials of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of particle physics models.…
It has recently been suggested that a strongly coupled phase of inflation may be described holographically in terms of a weakly coupled quantum field theory (QFT). Here, we explore the possibility that the wave function of an inflationary…
We discuss the additional perturbation introduced during inflation by quantum stress tensor fluctuations of a conformally invariant field such as the photon. We consider both a kinematical model, which deals only with the expansion…
Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density…
In scenarios of physical interest in Loop Quantum Cosmology, with a preinflationary epoch where the kinetic energy of the inflaton dominates, the analytic study of the dynamics of the primordial fluctuations has been carried out by…
A model of cosmological inflation is proposed in which field space is a hyperbolic plane. The inflaton never slow-rolls, and instead orbits the bottom of the potential, buoyed by a centrifugal force. Though initial velocities redshift away…
The quantum theory of cosmological perturbations in single field inflation is formulated in terms of a path integral. Starting from a canonical formulation, we show how the free propagators can be obtained from the well known…
We study models of inflation where the inflaton corresponds to a flat direction in field space and its mass term is generated by gravity mediated soft supersymmetry breaking at high scale. Assuming the inflaton to have non negligible…
We study the non-linear dynamics of an inflationary phase transition in a quartically self coupled inflaton model within the framework of a de Sitter background. Large N and Hartree non-perturbative approximations combined with…
We discuss a novel scenario for early cosmology, when the inflationary quasi-de Sitter phase dynamically originates from the initial quantum state represented by the microcanonical density matrix. This genuine quantum effect occurs as a…
We consider the quasi-de Sitter geometry of the inflationary universe. We calculate the energy flux of the slowly rolling background scalar field through the quasi-de Sitter apparent horizon and set it equal to the change of the entropy…
A Schroedinger picture analysis of time dependent quantum oscillators, in a manner of Guth and Pi, clearly identifies two physical mechanisms for possible decoherence of vacuum fluctuations in early universe: turning of quantum oscillators…
An appealing feature of inflationary cosmology is the presence of a phase-space attractor, "slow roll", which washes out the dependence on initial field velocities. We investigate the robustness of this property under backreaction from…
Quantum gravity computations suggest the existence of an ultraviolet and an infrared fixed point where quantum scale invariance emerges as an exact symmetry. We discuss a particular variable gravity model for the crossover between these…
Out-of-equilibrium, non-perturbative, quantum effects significantly modify the standard picture of inflation in a wide class of models including new, natural, and hybrid inflation. We find that the quantum evolution of a single real…
We consider models of inflation in supergravity with a shift symmetry. We focus on models with one moduli and one inflaton field. The presence of this symmetry guarantees the existence of a flat direction for the inflaton field. Mildly…
We present two- and three-dimensional simulations of the growth of quantum fluctuations of the scalar fields in supersymmetric hybrid inflation models. For a natural range of couplings, sub-horizon quantum fluctuations undergo rapid growth…
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…
Until recently our knowledge of the primordial curvature perturbation was relatively modest. Ever since COBE delivered its map of data we know the scalar spectrum of primordial perturbations is approximately flat, with the power being only…