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We point out that supergravity effects enable the inflaton to decay into all matter fields, including the visible and the supersymmetry breaking sectors, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. The new decay…
We perform an analytical study of the stability of the background solution of the model in which an inflaton, through an axionic coupling to a $U(1)$ gauge field, causes an amplification of the gauge field modes that strongly backreact on…
We present new single field inflationary scenarios that produce the critical abundance of primordial black holes as dark matter reconstructing the inflaton potential from an input power spectrum. The method is exact in the slow roll…
Recent works have demonstrated the necessity of capturing the local inhomogeneous physics in axion inflation, and showed new genuine features, most notably the extension of the inflationary period dictated by an electromagnetic slow-roll…
We study in detail the fully inhomogeneous non-linear dynamics of axion inflation, identifying three regimes: weak-, mild-, and strong-backreaction, depending on the duration of inflation. We use lattice techniques that explicitly preserve…
Large field inflation is arguably the simplest and most natural variant of slow-roll inflation. Axion monodromy may be the most promising framework for realising this scenario. As one of its defining features, the long-range polynomial…
In this work, we investigate the post-inflationary dynamics of a simple single-field model with a renormalizable inflaton potential featuring a near-inflection point at a field value $\phi_0$. Due to the concave shape of the scalar…
We investigate models in which the inflaton emerges as a composite field of a four dimensional, strongly interacting and nonsupersymmetric gauge theory featuring purely fermionic matter. We show that it is possible to obtain successful…
Recent study [1] has suggested that warm inflation may be realized with a minimal extension of the Standard Model by a single scalar inflaton field with an axion-like coupling to gluons. Motivated by this framework, we investigate the…
We show how backreaction of the inflaton potential energy on heavy scalar fields can flatten the inflationary potential, as the heavy fields adjust to their most energetically favorable configuration. This mechanism operates in previous…
We develop a procedure for re-summing the large logarithms induced in gravity by loops of inflationary scalars. We first show how the scalar can be integrated out of the field equations in the presence of constant graviton field. We then…
We apply recently developed path integral resummation methods to perturbative quantum gravity. In particular, we provide supporting evidence that eikonal graviton amplitudes factorize into hard and soft parts, and confirm a recent…
We identify a new mechanism in supergravity theories which leads to successful inflation without any need for fine tuning. The simplest model yields a spectrum of density fluctuations tilted away from scale-invariance and negligible…
We review some perturbative results obtained in quantum gravity in an accelerating cosmological background. We then describe a class of non-local, purely gravitational models which have the correct structure to reproduce the leading…
Processes of particle production during inflation can increase the amplitude of the scalar metric perturbations. We show that such a mechanism can naturally arise in supergravity models where an axion-like field, whose potential is…
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 study multi-field inflation models that contain a non-trivial field-space metric and a non-minimal coupling between the gravity and inflaton sectors. In such models it is known that even in the absence of explicit interaction terms the…
Wrapped branes in string compactifications introduce a monodromy that extends the field range of individual closed-string axions to beyond the Planck scale. Furthermore, approximate shift symmetries of the system naturally control…
The weak gravity conjecture states that quantum gravity theories have to contain a charged state with a charge-to-mass ratio bigger than unity. By studying unitarity and causality constraints on higher derivative corrections to the…
We study the dynamics of the Affleck-Dine field after inflation in more detail. After inflation, the Affleck-Dine field inevitably oscillates around the potential minimum. This oscillation is hard to decay and can cause accidental…