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The primordial spectrum of fluctuations may present a large peak as a result of enhancing features during inflation. This may include, but is not limited to, bumps in the inflaton's potential, phases of ultra-slow-roll or turns in…
We propose a stringy version of the old inflation scenario which does not require any slow-roll inflaton potential and is based on a specific example of string compatification with warped metric. Our set-up admits the presence of…
This is a short review of string cosmology. We wish to connect string-scale physics as closely as possible to observables accessible to current or near-future experiments. Our possible best hope to do so is a description of inflation in…
An attractive candidate for the inflaton is an axion slowly rolling down a flat potential protected by a perturbative shift symmetry. Realisations of this idea within large field, natural and monomial inflation have been disfavoured by…
The next generation of cosmological observations will be sensitive to small deviations from a pure power law in the primordial power spectrum of the curvature perturbations. In the context of slow-roll inflation, these deviations are…
Four-dimensional gravitational theories derived from an infinite sum of Lovelock curvature invariants, combined with a conformal rescaling of the metric, are equivalent to a subclass of shift-symmetric Horndeski theories that possess a…
We study the CMB observables in axion monodromy inflation. These well-motivated scenarios for inflation in string theory have monomial potentials over super-Planckian field ranges, with superimposed sinusoidal modulations from instanton…
We study the primordial tensor perturbation produced from the double inflationary scenario with an intermediate break stage. Because of the transitions, the power spectrum deviates from the vacuum one and there will appear oscillatory…
Inflection point inflation generically includes a deviation from slow-roll when the inflaton approaches the inflection point. Such deviations are shown to be generated by transitions between singular trajectories. The effects on the power…
We consider a cosmological scenario within the KKLT framework for moduli stabilization in string theory. The universal open string tachyon of decaying non-BPS D-brane configurations is proposed to drive eternal topological inflation.…
We consider inflation using a class of non-canonical Lagrangians for which the modification to the kinetic term depends on the field, but not its derivatives. We generalize the standard Hubble slow roll expansion to the non-canonical case…
We provide type IIB string embeddings of two axion variants of natural inflation. We use a combination of RR 2 form axions as the inflaton field and have its potential generated by non perturbative effects in the superpotential. Besides…
Successful inflationary models should (i) describe the data well; (ii) arise generically from sensible UV completions; (iii) be insensitive to detailed fine-tunings of parameters and (iv) make interesting new predictions. We argue that a…
In [1] a new cosmological model is proposed with no big bang singularity in the past, though past geodesically incomplete. This model starts with an inflationary era, follows with a stiff matter dominated period and evolves to accelerated…
We study an inflationary model where two decoupled string axions drive inflation. The number of e-folds is dependent on the energy scale and the decay constant, but is almost independent of the angular component in spite of the rich…
In the present work we discuss cosmic strings in natural inflation. Our analysis is based entirely on the CMB quadrupole temperature anisotropy and on the existing upper bound on the cosmic string tension. Our results show that the allowed…
We examine the conditions under which a perturbative expansion around an inflating background is valid. When inflation is driven by a single field with a general sound speed, we find a lower limit on the sound speed related to the amplitude…
We compute corrections to the inflationary potential due to conformally coupled non-relativistic matter. We find that under certain conditions of the matter coupling, inflation may be interrupted abruptly. We display this in the…
I elaborate on a link between the string--scale breaking of supersymmetry that occurs in a class of superstring models and the onset of inflation. The link rests on spatially flat cosmologies supported by a scalar field driven by an…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…