Related papers: Squeezing the Axion
At the end of inflation, dynamical instability can rapidly deposit the energy of homogeneous cold inflaton into excitations of other fields. This process, known as preheating, is rather violent, inhomogeneous and non-linear, and has to be…
The formation of frozen classical perturbations from vacuum quantum fluctuations during inflation is described as a unitary quantum process with apparent "decoherence" caused by the expanding spacetime. It is argued that the maximum…
We consider the quasi-de Sitter geometry of the inflationary universe. We calculate the energy flux of the slowly rolling background scalar field through the quasi-de Sitter apparent horizon and set it equal to the change of the entropy…
We revisit inflationary cosmology of axion models in the light of recent developments on the inflaton decay in supergravity. We find that all the cosmological difficulties, including gravitino, axino overproduction and axionic isocurvature…
Light scalar fields acquire isocurvature fluctuations during inflation. While these fluctuations could lead to interesting observable signatures at small scales, they are strongly constrained on large scales by cosmic microwave background…
We numerically compute features in the power-spectrum that originate from the decay of fields during inflation. Using a simple, phenomenological, multi-field setup, we increase the number of fields from a few to thousands. Whenever a field…
In standard inflationary cosmology, scalar and tensor perturbations grew as the Universe expanded and froze when their wavelengths exceeded the Hubble horizon, producing a tell-tale signature in the fluctuation spectrum and amplitude of the…
We investigated inflation in the Higgs-$R^2$ model and assumed the trajectory to follow a single-field approximation called minimal two-field mode. Using this approximation, we tried to constrain the Higgs' non-minimal coupling $\xi$.…
We probe the cosmological consequences of a recently proposed class of solutions to the cosmological constant problem. In these models, the universe undergoes a long period of inflation followed by a contraction and a bounce that sets the…
A safe way to reheat the universe, in models of natural and quadratic inflation, is through shift symmetric couplings between the inflaton $\phi$ and the Standard Model (SM), since they do not generate loop corrections to the potential…
In this paper we skim the true phenomenological requirements behind the concept of inflationary squeezing. We argue that all that is required is that at horizon re-entry the fluctuations form standing waves with the correct temporal phase…
We present a model of inflation where the inflaton is accommodated as a phantom field which exhibits an initial transient pole behavior and then decays into a quintessence field which is responsible for a radiation era. We must stress that…
Axion scenarios in which the spontaneous breaking of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry takes place before or during inflation, and in which axion dark matter arises from the misalignment mechanism, can be constrained by Cosmic Microwave Background…
Axions play a central role in many realizations of large field models of inflation and in recent alternative mechanisms for generating primordial tensor modes in small field models. If these axions couple to gauge fields, the coupling…
We investigate the entropy dynamics of de Sitter spacetime during the inflationary phase. The cosmological horizon in de Sitter spacetime, which limits the causally accessible region for an observer, exhibits thermal properties similar to a…
We derive an uncertainty relation for the energy density and pressure of a quantum scalar field in a time-dependent, homogeneous and isotropic, classical background, which implies the existence of large fluctuations comparable to their…
The decoherence of quantum fluctuations into classical perturbations during inflation is discussed. A simple quantum mechanical argument, using a spatial particle wavefunction rather than a field description, shows that observable…
The large-scale magnetic fields arising from the quantum mechanical fluctuations of the hypercharge are investigated when the evolution of the gauge coupling is combined with a sufficiently long inflationary stage. In this framework the…
The prediction of a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of curvature and tensor fluctuations is among the main features of cosmic inflation. The current measurements of the primordial fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB)…
The $SL(2,\mathbb{Z})$ invariant $\alpha$-attractor models have plateau potentials with respect to the inflaton and axion fields. The potential in the axion direction is almost exactly flat during inflation, hence, the axion field remains…