Related papers: Planckian hypersurfaces, inflation and bounces
We consider a quantum deformation of the wave equation on a cosmological background as a toy-model for possible trans-Planckian effects. We compute the power spectrum of scalar and tensor fluctuations for power-law inflation, and find a…
A very simple non-singular inflationary model is presented where the unique matter content is a radiation fluid. The model slowly contracts from a very large, almost empty and flat spacetime and realizes a bounce. It is then launched to a…
The power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from both the Planck and WMAP data exhibits a slight dip in for multipoles in the range of l=10-30. We show that such a dip could be the result of resonant creation of a massive particle…
A recent paper argued that it is not possible to infer the energy scale of inflation from the amplitude of tensor fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, because the usual connection is substantially altered if there are a large…
In single-field, slow-roll inflationary models, scalar and tensorial (Gaussian) perturbations are both characterized by a zero mean and a non-zero variance. In position space, the corresponding variance of those fields diverges in the…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…
In the framework of inflation, scales which nowadays correspond to large scale structures were smaller than the Planck length at the beginning of inflation. Therefore, measurements of CMBR anisotropy or surveys of galaxies and of clusters…
If the inflationary phase lasted longer than the minimal period, the length scales observed today originate from modes that were smaller than the Planck length during inflation. It was recently argued that this "trans-Planckian problem" can…
We show that the prediction for the primordial tensor power spectrum cannot be modified at leading order in derivatives. Indeed, one can always set to unity the speed of propagation of gravitational waves during inflation by a suitable…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
A self-consistent pre-inflationary extension of the inflationary scenario with the Starobinsky potential, favored by Planck data, is studied using techniques from loop quantum cosmology (LQC). The results are compared with the quadratic…
The trans-Planckian censorship conjecture implies that single-field models of inflation require an extreme fine-tuning of the initial conditions due to the very low-scale of inflation. In this work, we show how a quantum cosmological…
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…
We consider the effects of inhomogeneous initial conditions in both the scalar field profile and the extrinsic curvature on different inflationary models. In particular, we compare the robustness of small field inflation to that of large…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
Since trans-Planckian considerations can be associated with the re-definition of the initial vacuum, we investigate further the influence of trans-Planckian physics on the spectra produced by the initial quasi-de Sitter (dS) state during…
Although the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is largely understood to be homogeneous and isotropic, the CMB angular power spectra present anomalies that seem to break down parity symmetry at large angular scales. We argue that the…
We calculate the spectrum of density fluctuations in models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, and specifically investigate the dependence of the predictions on modifications of the…
In this work we investigate the inflationary era in the presence of a canonical scalar field and Chern-Simons parity violating corrections. It was also assumed that a non minimal coupling between curvature and the scalar field is present.…
The phenomenon of resonant production of particles {\it after} inflation has received much attention in the past few years. In a new application of resonant production of particles, we consider the effect of a resonance {\em during}…