Related papers: Natural inflation, strong dynamics, and the role o…
In negatively curved field spaces, inflation can be realised even in steep potentials. Hyperinflation invokes the `centrifugal force' of a field orbiting the hyperbolic plane to sustain inflation. We generalise hyperinflation by showing…
Following the recent Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) results, we consider hilltop inflation where the inflaton is coupled to a curvaton, simultaneously addressing two main challenges faced by conventional hilltop inflation models: the…
Inflation in cosmology is a specific stage preceding the Big Bang, aimed at solving both old background problems and new perturbation issues. Single-field inflation is a candidate to illustrate the picture of the initial universe, and…
We develop a numerical statistical method to study linear cosmological fluctuations in inflationary scenarios with multiple fields, and apply it to an ensemble of six-field inflection point models in string theory. The latter are concrete…
We study the cosmology of a toy modified theory of gravity in which gravity shuts off at short distances, as in the fat graviton scenario of Sundrum. In the weak-field limit, the theory is perturbatively local, ghost-free and unitary,…
We present an inflationary universe model which utilizes two coupled real scalar fields. The inflation field $\phi$ experiences a first order phase transition and its potential dominates the energy density of the Universe during the…
We investigate an inflationary scenario driven by a complex scalar field nonminimally coupled to gravity and subject to a non-symmetric complex potential. The real part of the potential controls the cosmological background and realizes a…
We propose a new framework for multi-field inflation in which a nearly constant potential energy is maintained during inflation before decreasing rapidly, in a manner analogous to a classical top spinning upright for a long time before…
Models of inflationary cosmology based on spontaneous symmetry breaking typically suffer from the shortcoming that the symmetry breaking scale is driven to nearly the Planck scale by observational constraints. In this paper we investigate…
One of the fundamental objectives of contemporary cosmology is to understand the physics of the inflationary universe, owing to its observably verifiable predictions about the very early universe with an energy scale of $\sim 10^{16}$ GeV.…
Single-field models of inflation are analysed in light of the WMAP five-year data. Assuming instantaneous reheating, we find that modular/new inflation models with small powers in the effective inflaton self-interaction are more strongly…
One of the major pillars of modern cosmology theory is a period of accelerating expansion in the early universe. This accelerating expansion, or inflation, must be sustained for at least 30 e--foldings. One mechanism used to drive the…
Inflation with tunneling from a false to a true vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a scalar field that slows down the initial de Sitter phase. As a by-product this field also sets dynamically the value of the Newton constant observed…
Chain Inflation is an alternative to slow roll inflation in which the universe undergoes a series of transitions between different vacua. The density perturbations (studied in this paper) are seeded by the probabilistic nature of tunneling…
We place observational constraints on slow-variation single-field inflationary models by carrying out the cosmological Monte Carlo simulation with the recent data of Planck combined with the WMAP large-angle polarization, baryon acoustic…
We propose a class of single-field, slow-roll inflation models in which a typical number of $e$-folds can be extremely large. The key point is to introduce a very shallow local minimum near the top of the potential in a hilltop inflation…
In this paper we report on a major theoretical observation in cosmology. We present a concrete cosmological model for which inflation has natural beginning and natural ending. Inflation is driven by a cosine-form potential, $V(\phi)=…
We investigate the possibility that inflation originates from a composite field theory, in terms of an effective chiral Lagrangian involving a dilaton and pions. The walking dynamics of the theory constrain the potential in a specific way,…
We study the evolution of regions of space with various initial field values for a simple theory that can support hybrid inflation. Only very narrow domains within the range of initial field values below the Planck scale lead to the onset…
We reconsider the problems of cosmological inflation in effective supergravity theories. A singlet field in a hidden sector is demonstrated to yield an acceptable inflationary potential, without fine tuning. In the simplest such model, the…