Related papers: A Cosmic Microscope for the Preheating Era
Inflation can act as a space-time microscope for Planck or string scale effects, leaving potentially observable traces in the primordial perturbation spectrum. I discuss two frameworks that were used recently to study this phenomenon:…
Primordial non-Gaussianity is a potentially powerful discriminant of the physical mechanisms that generated the cosmological fluctuations observed today. Any detection of significant non-Gaussianity would thus have profound implications for…
Preheating at the end of inflation is a violent nonlinear process that efficiently transfers the energy of the inflaton to a second field, the preheat field. When the preheat field is light during inflation and its background value…
We develop a new approach to local nonlinear effects in cosmic microwave background anisotropies, and discuss the qualitative features of these effects. New couplings of the baryonic velocity to radiation multipoles are found, arising from…
The possibility of thermally induced initial density perturbations in inflationary cosmology is examined. The fluctuation dynamics of a scalar field plus thermal bath system during slow roll is described by a Langevin-like equation.…
As increasingly precise information about the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background fluctuations is gathered with balloon and satellite experiments, interest has grown in foreground sources of opacity affecting these observations. One…
The origin of astrophysical magnetic fields observed in galaxies and clusters of galaxies is still unclear. One possibility is that primordial magnetic fields generated in the early Universe provide seeds that grow through compression and…
The perturbation of a light field might affect preheating and hence generate a contribution to the spectrum and non-gaussianity of the curvature perturbation \zeta. The field might appear directly in the preheating model (curvaton-type…
There might be a light scalar field during inflation which is not responsible for the accelerating inflationary expansion. Then, its quantum fluctuation is stretched during inflation. This scalar field could be a curvaton, if it decays at a…
A mechanism for generating metric perturbations in inflationary models is considered. Long-wavelength inhomogeneities of light scalar fields in a decoupled sector may give rise to superhorizon fluctuations of couplings and masses in the…
We introduce a general class of models for charaterizing the non-Gaussian properties of foreground contaminants in the cosmic microwave background with view towards the removal of the non-primordial non-Gaussian signal from the primordial…
In the pre-reheating era, following cosmic inflation and preceding radiation domination, the energy density may be dominated by an oscillating massive scalar condensate, such as is the case for quadratic chaotic inflation. We have found in…
Weak-lensing distortions of the cosmic-microwave-background (CMB) temperature and polarization patterns can reveal important clues to the intervening large-scale structure. The effect of lensing is to deflect the primary temperature and…
We investigate whether a recently proposed modulation of the power spectrum of primordial density fluctuations generated through transplankian (maybe stringy) effects during inflation can be observed. We briefly review the mechanism leading…
Fluctuations in high-redshift cosmic 21-cm radiation provide a new window for observing unconventional effects of high-energy physics in the primordial spectrum of density perturbations. In scenarios for which the initial state prior to…
The variation of the perturbative 3-curvature parameter, \zeta, is investigated in the period of reheating after inflation. The two-field model used has the inflaton, with an extra scalar field coupled to it, and non-linear effects of both…
We study the amplification of large-scale magnetic fields during preheating and inflation in several different models. Preheating can resonantly amplify seed fields on cosmological scales. In the presence of conductivity, however, the…
We study the sensitivity of cosmological observables to the reheating phase following inflation driven by many scalar fields. We describe a method which allows semi-analytic treatment of the impact of perturbative reheating on cosmological…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
Anisotropies in distortions to the frequency spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) can be created through spatially varying heating processes in the early Universe. For instance, the dissipation of small-scale acoustic modes…