Related papers: A Walking Dilaton Inflation
We describe a class of relativistic models incorporating finite density of matter in which spontaneous breakdown of continuous symmetries leads to a lesser number of Nambu-Goldstone bosons than that required by the Goldstone theorem. This…
A characteristic of D-brane inflation is that fluctuations in the inflaton field can propagate at a speed significantly less than the speed of light. This yields observable effects that are distinct from those of single-field slow roll…
We analyse the dynamics of spinodal decomposition in inflationary cosmology using the closed time path formalism of out of equilibrium quantum field theory combined with the non-perturbative Hartree approximation. In addition to a general…
We extend dilaton chiral perturbation theory (dChPT) to include the taste splittings in the Nambu--Goldstone sector observed in lattice simulations of near-conformal theories with staggered fermions. We then apply dChPT to a recent…
Inflation driven by a single, minimally coupled, slowly rolling field generically yields a negligible primordial non-Gaussianity. We discuss two distinct mechanisms by which a non-trivial potential can generate large non-Gaussianities.…
We provide an update on five relatively well motivated inflationary models in which the inflaton is a Standard Model singlet scalar field. These include i) the textbook quadratic and quartic potential models but with additional couplings of…
We describe a simple mechanism that can lead to inflation within string-based brane-world scenarios. The idea is to start from a supersymmetric configuration with two parallel static Dp-branes, and slightly break the supersymmetry…
Inflation, as currently understood, requires the presence of fields with very flat potentials. Supersymmetric models in which supersymmetry breaking is communicated by supergravity naturally yield such fields, but the scales are typically…
Explaining cosmic inflation by the effective dynamics of an $SU(N_C)$ pure gauge theory of scale $\La\sim 10^{-6} M_p$ is lacking an explanation of the (Gaussian) spatial curvature perturbations needed to seed the formation of large-scale…
This thesis presents a possible inflation scenario as a consequence of non-minimal gravitational couplings in the Conformal Standard Model. That model consists, in comparison to the SM, of additional right-chiral neutrinos and a complex…
In a one-generation fermion condensate scheme of electroweak symmetry breaking, it is proven based on Schwinger-Dyson equation in the real-time thermal field theory in the fermion bubble diagram approximation that, at finite temperature $T$…
We re-examine large scalar fields within effective field theory, in particular focussing on the issues raised by their use in inflationary models (as suggested by BICEP2 to obtain primordial tensor modes). We argue that when the large-field…
There is increasing interest in the role played by pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons (pNGBs) in the construction of string-inspired models of inflation. In these models the inflaton is expected to be coupled to gauge fields, and will lead to…
At finite temperature, the Nambu-Goldstone bosons of a spontaneously broken chiral symmetry travel at a velocity $v < 1$. This effect first appears at order $\sim T^4$ in an expansion about low temperature, and can be related to the…
Inflation generally assumes a field with nonzero potential that leads to inflationary expansion happening at arbitrarily early times. We demonstrate potentially observable consequences of inflation with a finite initial time in a model in…
The model of Natural Inflation is examined in light of recent 3-year data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe and shown to provide a good fit. The inflaton potential is naturally flat due to shift symmetries, and in the simplest…
We study a variant of the Chromo-Natural Inflation (CNI) mechanism in which the inflaton interacts only gravitationally with the CNI fields. Integrating out all the non-dynamical scalar fields of the model results in a coupling between the…
We propose a natural double inflation model in supergravity. In this model, chaotic inflation first takes place by virtue of the Nambu-Goldstone-like shift symmetry, which guarantees the absence of the exponential factor in the potential…
We propose a novel scenario in which scalar perturbations, that seed the large scale structure of the Universe, are generated without relying on a scalar field (the inflaton). In this framework, inflation is driven by a de Sitter space-time…
The idea that the explicit breaking of scale invariance by the trace anomaly of QCD can be rephrased as a spontaneous breaking has been recently exploited to capture the low-energy strong interaction dynamics of dense (and also hot) matter…