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Making use of the wealth of new observational data coming from the sky it is possible to constrain particle physics theories beyond the Standard Model. One way to do this is illustrated in this article: a subset of theories admits cosmic…
Supersymmetric theories, including the minimal supersymmetric standard model, usually contain many scalar fields whose potentials are absent in the exact supersymmetric limit and within the renormalizable level. Since their potentials are…
Natural (axionic) inflation provides a well-motivated and predictive scheme for the description of the early universe. It leads to sizeable primordial tensor modes and thus a high mass scale of the inflationary potential. Naively this seems…
We discuss a novel mechanism to generate gravitational waves in the early universe. A standard way to produce primordial black holes is to enhance at small-scales the overdensity perturbations generated during inflation. The latter, upon…
In many moduli stabilization schemes in string theory, the scale of inflation appears to be of the same order as the scale of supersymmetry breaking. For low-scale supersymmetry breaking, therefore, the scale of inflation should also be…
We demonstrate that "natural inflation", also known as "axion inflation", can be compatible with Planck 2018 measurements of the cosmic microwave background, while predicting an exponentially small tensor-to-scalar ratio, e.g., $r\sim…
It has recently been shown that a Hagedorn phase of string gas cosmology can provide a causal mechanism for generating a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of scalar metric fluctuations, without the need for an intervening period of de Sitter…
The leading candidate for the very early universe is described by a period of rapid expansion known as inflation. While the standard paradigm invokes a single slow-rolling field, many different models may be constructed which fit the…
Scalar-induced gravitational waves (SIGWs) provide a powerful probe of inflationary dynamics on scales far smaller than those accessible to the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure. In scenarios with a transient…
We discuss the possibility of a feature in the spectrum of inflationary gravitational waves sourced by a scalar field $\chi$ whose vacuum fluctuations are amplified by a rapidly time dependent mass. Unlike previous work which has focused on…
The theory of bigravity offers one of the simplest possibilities to describe a massive graviton while having self-accelerating cosmological solutions without a cosmological constant. However, it has been shown recently that bigravity is…
We consider inflation in a universe with a positive cosmological constant and a nonminimally coupled scalar field, in which the field couples both quadratically and quartically to the Ricci scalar. When considered in the Einstein frame and…
Inflationary cosmology is successful in explaining a number of outstanding cosmological issues including the flatness, the horizon and the relic issues. More spectacular is the experimental confirmation of the structure as arose from the…
Present data require a spectral index $n\gsim 0.95$ at something like 1-$\sigma$ level. If this lower bound survives it will constrain `new' and `modular' inflation models, while raising it to 1.00 would rule out all of these models plus…
Inflationary era of our Universe can be characterized as semi-classical because it can be described in the context of four-dimensional Einsteins's gravity involving quantum corrections. These string motivated corrections originate from…
We show that in multi-stage axion monodromy inflation an interruption near the end of the penultimate stage can lead to a spike in the gravitational wave background. These gravitational waves are in the frequency range and with an amplitude…
Recent developments in inflation model building, based on supersymmetry, have produced compelling models in which strings are produced at the end of inflation. In such models the cosmological perturbations are seeded both by the defects and…
Cosmic strings are generic cosmological predictions of many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, such as a $U(1)^\prime$ symmetry breaking phase transition in the early universe or remnants of superstring theory. Unlike…
I will review briefly how inflation is expected to generate a stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves (GWs). Then, I will discuss how such GWs can be enhanced by a stiff period following inflation, enough to be observable. I…
The post-inflationary production of supermassive particles can have profound implications for the thermal history of the universe and may leave observable imprints in the gravitational wave (GW) background. In scenarios where the inflaton…