Related papers: Constraining graviton non-Gaussianity through the …
Gravitational waves are one of the most important diagnostic tools in the analysis of strong-gravity dynamics and have been turned into an observational channel with LIGO's detection of GW150914. Aside from their importance in astrophysics,…
We give a general expression for the Weyl tensor two-point function in a general Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker spacetime. We work in reduced phase space for the perturbations, i.e., quantize only the dynamical degrees of freedom…
We perform a manifestly covariant quantization of a Weyl invariant, i.e., a locally scale invariant, scalar-tensor gravity in the extended de Donder gauge condition (or harmonic gauge condition) for general coordinate invariance and a new…
In the gravitational effective theories including higher curvature terms, cosmological solutions can have nontrivial de Sitter fixed points. We study phenomenological implications of such points, focusing on a theory in which a massive…
The theory of bigravity offers one of the simplest possibilities to describe a massive graviton while having self-accelerating cosmological solutions without a cosmological constant. However, it has been shown recently that bigravity is…
We summarize recent progress in understanding the role of higher-derivative terms in the asymptotic safety scenario of gravity. Extending previous computations based on the functional renormalization group approach by including a…
In string theory inspired models of axion-like fields, sub-leading non-perturbative effects, if sufficiently large, can introduce steep cliffs and gentle plateaus onto the underlying scalar potential. During inflation, the motion of a…
Although cosmological observations suggest that the fluctuations of seed fields are almost Gaussian, the possibility of a small deviation of their fields from Gaussianity is widely discussed. Theoretically, there exist numerous inflationary…
There exist consistent low energy effective field theories describing gravity in the Higgs phase that allow the coexistence of massive gravitons and the conventional 1/r potential of gravity. In an effort to constrain the value of the…
Cosmological models with Galileon gravity are an alternative to the standard $\Lambda {\rm CDM}$ paradigm with testable predictions at the level of its self-accelerating solutions for the expansion history, as well as large-scale structure…
Inflation may provide a suitable collider to probe physics at very high energies. In this paper we investigate the impact on the CMB bispectrum of higher spin fields which are long-lived on super-Hubble scales, e.g. partially massless…
To investigate the cosmic no hair conjecture, we analyze numerically 1-dimensional plane symmetrical inhomogeneities due to gravitational waves in vacuum spacetimes with a positive cosmological constant. Assuming periodic gravitational…
Evidence for the presence of extra fields during inflation may be found in the anisotropies of the scalar and tensor spectra across a vast range of scales. Indeed, beyond the single-field slow-roll paradigm, a long tensor mode can modulate…
We study non-Gaussian signatures on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation predicted within inflationary models with non-vacuum initial states for cosmological perturbations. The model incorporates a privileged scale, which implies…
We study the realization of cosmic inflation in bigravity theories. By analyzing the evolution of scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations in de Sitter-like spacetimes, we find strong stability constraints on the class of viable vacua…
It is commonly assumed that the stochastic background of gravitational waves on cosmological scales follows an almost scale-independent power spectrum, as generically predicted by the inflationary paradigm. However, it is not inconceivable…
We formulate new boundary conditions that prove well defined variational principle and finite response functions for conformal gravity (CG). In the Anti--de Sitter/conformal field theory framework, gravity theory that is considered in the…
We identify models of supersymmetric hybrid inflation in which the tensor-to-scalar ratio, a canonical measure of gravity waves produced during inflation, can be as large as 0.03 or so, which will be tested by the Planck satellite…
We present a new formulation for the canonical approach to conformal (Weyl-squared) gravity and its extension by the Einstein-Hilbert term and a nonminimally coupled scalar field. For this purpose we use a unimodular decomposition of the…
Many inflation models predict that primordial density perturbations have a nonzero three-point correlation function, or bispectrum in Fourier space. Of the several possibilities for this bispectrum, the most commmon is the local-model…