Related papers: Does Planck Actually "See" the Bunch-Davies State?
Recent models for the large-scale Galactic magnetic fields in the literature have been largely constrained by synchrotron emission and Faraday rotation measures. We use three different but representative models to compare their predicted…
We extend and improve the modeling and analysis of large-amplitude, sharp inflationary steps for second order corrections required by the precision of the Planck CMB power spectrum and for arbitrary Dirac-Born-Infeld sound speed. With two…
We compute the evolution of the entanglement entropy for a massless field within a spherical region throughout the inflationary period and the subsequent era of radiation domination, starting from the Bunch-Davies vacuum. In order to focus…
The results from Planck2015, when combined with earlier observations from WMAP, ACT, SPT and other experiments, were the first observations to disfavor the "classic" inflationary paradigm. To satisfy the observational constraints,…
We use the techniques of effective field theory in an expanding universe to examine the effect of choosing an excited inflationary initial state built over the Bunch-Davies state on the CMB bi-spectrum. We find that even for Hadamard…
In the light of the Planck 2015 results, we update simple inflationary models based on the quadratic, quartic, Higgs and Coleman-Weinberg potentials in the context of the Randall-Sundrum brane-world cosmology. Brane-world cosmological…
The recently relased \emph{Planck} data, emphasize that the background geometry of inflation is not pure de Sitter, but from the slow variation of Hubble parameter during the inflationary era, it can be quasi-de Sitter. This motivates us to…
Recent results from the Planck satellite combined with earlier observations from WMAP, ACT, SPT and other experiments eliminate a wide spectrum of more complex inflationary models and favor models with a single scalar field, as reported by…
The initial quantum state during inflation may evolve to a highly squeezed quantum state due to the amplification of the time-dependent parameter, $\omega_{phys}(k/a)$, which may be the modified dispersion relation in trans-Planckian…
The six parameters of the standard $\Lambda$CDM model have best-fit values derived from the Planck temperature power spectrum that are shifted somewhat from the best-fit values derived from WMAP data. These shifts are driven by features in…
We simulate Planck observations by adopting a detailed model of the microwave sky including monopole, dipole, anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and galactic and extragalactic foregrounds. We estimate the impact of main…
We revisit the observational constraints on spatial curvature following recent claims that the Planck data favour a closed Universe. We use a new and statistically powerful Planck likelihood to show that the Planck temperature and…
The BB-mode angular correlation power spectrum of CMB is obtained by considering the primordial gravitational waves in the squeezed vacuum state for various inflationary models and results are compared with the joint analysis of the…
For 40 years, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been the most important source of information about the geometry and contents of the Universe. Even so, only a small fraction of the information available in the CMB has been extracted…
There exist a one complex parameter family of de Sitter invariant vacua, known as alpha vacua. In the context of slow roll inflation, we show that all but the Bunch-Davies vacuum generates unacceptable production of high energy particles at…
We study Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data using the energy density inhomogeneity power spectrum generated by quantum fluctuations during an early epoch of inflation in the non-flat XCDM model. Here dark energy…
Recent work by Ringermacher and Mead has revealed discrete oscillations in the cosmological scale factor, suggesting that spacetime may exhibit vibrational properties akin to those of a crystal. Building on this idea, we propose a novel…
We analyze an inflationary model in which part of the power in density perturbations arises due to particle production. The amount of particle production is modulated by an auxiliary field. Given an initial gradient for the auxiliary field,…
We consider supersymmetric shifted hybrid inflation models with a red tilted scalar spectral index n_s in agreement with the WMAP 7-yr central value. If non-minimal supergravity corrections are included, these models can also support a…
In the standard inflationary paradigm the inhomogeneities observed in the CMB arise from quantum fluctuations of an initially homogeneous and isotropic vacuum state. This picture suffers from two well-known weaknesses. First, it assumes…