Related papers: Escape from the swamp with spectator
The trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (TCC) puts an upper bound on the life-time of de Sitter spacetimes. It has immediate consequences for inflationary cosmology. In the standard paradigm, the universe has experienced a single stage of…
If inflation can occur only at the energy density V much smaller than the Planck density, which is the case for many inflationary models based on string theory, then the probability of quantum creation of a closed or an infinitely large…
We consider an inflationary model inspired in the low energy limit of string theory. In this model, the scale factor grows exponentially with time. A perturbation study is performed, and we show that there is a mode which displays an…
We explore the possibility of a single field quasi-de Sitter inflationary model with general initial state for primordial fluctuations. In this paper, first we compute the power spectrum and the bispectrum of scalar perturbations with…
String theory abounds with light scalar fields (the dilaton and various moduli) which create a host of observational problems, and notably some serious cosmological difficulties similar to the ones associated with the Polonyi field in the…
In this PhD thesis, we investigate generic features of inflation which are strictly related to fundamental aspects of UV-physics scenarios, such as string theory or supergravity. After a short introduction to standard and inflationary…
A number of Swampland conjectures and in particular the Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture (TCC) suggest that de Sitter space is highly unstable if it exists at all. In this paper we construct effective theories of scalars rolling on…
We investigate if the observed small and nearly scale-invariant primordial cosmic perturbation, i.e. the perturbation amplitude $P_\zeta\sim10^{-9}$ and the spectral index $n_s \simeq 0.965$, is typical in the landscape of vacua after…
Perturbations in cosmic microwave background (CMB) photons and large scale structure of the universe are sourced primarily by the curvature perturbation which is widely believed to be produced during inflation. In this paper we present a…
We present an inflationary model that is geodesically complete and does not suffer from the transplanckian problem. In most inflationary models, massless (conformal) scalar field fluctuations in a deSitter background gives rise to a…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
The motion of a pseudo-scalar field $X$ during inflation naturally induces a significant amplification of the gauge fields to which it is coupled. The amplified gauge fields can source characteristic scalar and tensor primordial…
We show that it is possible to combine an early phase of String Gas Cosmology which can explain the origin of the observed structures on cosmological scales with a short later period of power law inflation which creates spatial flatness.…
In this Letter, we briefly review the multi-stream inflation scenario, and discuss its implications in the string theory landscape and the inflationary multiverse. In multi-stream inflation, the inflation trajectory encounters bifurcations.…
We study the problem of obtaining de Sitter and inflationary vacua from dimensional reduction of double field theory (DFT) on nongeometric string backgrounds. In this context, we consider a new class of effective potentials that admit…
Massive fields during inflation provide an interesting opportunity to test new physics at very high energy scales. Meanwhile in fundamental realizations, the inflationary field space typically has a curved geometry, which may leave…
We present an explicit string realisation of a cosmological inflationary scenario we proposed recently within the framework of type IIB flux compactifications in the presence of three magnetised D7-brane stacks. Inflation takes place around…
We propose a new scenario for early cosmology, where an inflationary de Sitter phase is obtained with a ghost condensate. The transition to radiation dominance is triggered by the ghost itself, without any slow-roll potential. Density…
We show that there are inflationary models for which perturbations in the energy momentum tensor, which are of second order in the scalar field, cannot be neglected. We first specify the conditions under which the usual first order…
A long-standing problem in primordial cosmology is to understand the precise relation between the stochastic formalism and standard perturbation theory for light scalar fields in inflationary spacetimes. A complete correspondence between…