Related papers: Inflation: a quantum laboratory on cosmological sc…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
In loop quantum gravity, modifications to the geometrical density cause a self-interacting scalar field to accelerate away from a minimum of its potential. In principle, this mechanism can generate the conditions that subsequently lead to…
According to the inflationary theory of cosmology, most elementary particles in the current universe were created during a period of reheating after inflation. In this work we self-consistently couple the Einstein-inflaton equations to a…
In this paper we investigate the cosmological dynamics of geometric inflation by means of the tools of the dynamical systems theory. We focus in the study of two explicit models where it is possible to sum the infinite series of higher…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
Cosmic inflation is the leading theory to explain early Universe history and structure formation. Non-oscillatory inflation is a class of models which can naturally introduce a post-inflationary stiff period of the Universe's evolution…
Cosmological inflation provides the simplest and most promising mechanism for generating fluctuations for structure formation. Using powerful Hamilton-Jacobi methods, I will describe (1) how to compute density fluctuations and cosmic…
In the standard cosmological picture the Universe underwent a brief period of near-exponential expansion, known as Inflation. This provides an explanation for structure formation through the amplification of perturbations by the rapid…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
This thesis investigates cosmological particle production within Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetimes, both as a dark matter mechanism and through analog simulations using Bose-Einstein condensates. While a full theory of Quantum…
We propose a new single field inflation model in which the usual slow-roll inflation is joined to a new period of slow-climb and slow-roll inflation through a short intermediate non-inflationary phase. We then show that primordial curvature…
We investigate the circumstances under which cosmic inflation can arise from very inhomogeneous initial conditions using numerical relativity simulations. Previous studies have not considered cases with non-zero momentum density due to…
We present a review on the state-of-the-art of the mathematical framework known as stochastic inflation, paying special attention to its derivation and giving references for the readers interested on results coming from the application of…
This is a completely rewritten version of the talk I gave at the Philosophy of Cosmology conference in Tenerife, September 2014, which incorporates elements of my IFT Madrid Anthropics Conference talk. The original was too technical. The…
In this paper, we consider a nonminimal coupling model between gravity and nonlinear electrodynamics with cosmological constant. This cosmological model is designed to account for both the inflationary epoch of the early universe and the…
We consider the effect of quantum diffusion on the dynamics of the inflaton during a period of ultra-slow-roll inflation. We extend the stochastic-$\delta\mathcal{N}$ formalism to the ultra-slow-roll regime and show how this system can be…
This series of lectures gives a pedagogical review of the subject of cosmological inflation. I discuss Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology and the horizon and flatness problems of the standard hot Big Bang, and introduce inflation as a…
During inflation explicit perturbative computations of quantum field theories which contain massless, non-conformal fields exhibit secular effects that grow as powers of the logarithm of the inflationary scale factor. Starobinski\u{\i}'s…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
We show that inflationary cosmology may be used to test the statistical predictions of quantum theory at very short distances and at very early times. Hidden-variables theories, such as the pilot-wave theory of de Broglie and Bohm, allow…