Related papers: Escape from supercooling with or without bubbles: …
Reheating after inflation can proceed even if the inflaton couples to Standard Model (SM) particles only gravitationally. However, particle production during the transition between de-Sitter expansion and a decelerating Universe is rather…
In the very early Universe matter can be described as a conformal invariant ultra-relativistic perfect fluid, which does not contribute, on classical level, to the evolution of the isotropic and homogeneous metric. However, in this…
After inflation, a period of preheating may have produced a stochastic background of high frequency gravitational waves (GWs) that would persist until today. The nature of the inflaton's coupling to Standard Model or other fields is…
We study an inflation model with a flat scalar potential supported by observations and find that slow-roll inflation can emerge after a quasi-cyclic phase of the Universe, where it undergoes repeated expansions and contractions for a finite…
According to the standard lore, a prolonged inflation leaves a quantum field theory in a cold, low entropy state. Thus, some mechanism is needed to reheat this post-inflationary state, leaving a hot, thermal, radiation-dominated Universe.…
It was shown in previous work that when a gravitational wave (GW) passes through a viscous shell of matter the magnitude of the GW will be damped and there are astrohysical circumstances in which the damping is almost complete. The energy…
We study gravitational waves from supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions. If such a transition is followed by inefficient reheating, the evolution history of the universe is modified by a period of early matter domination.…
We point out a possible generation mechanism of non-Gaussian bubbles in the sky due to bubble nucleation in the early universe. We consider a curvaton scenario for inflation and assume that the curvaton field phi, whose energy density is…
We consider reheating in a class of asymptotically safe quantum field theories recently studied in \cite{Litim:2014uca, Litim:2015iea}. These theories allow for an inflationary phase in the very early universe. Inflation ends with a period…
Systems that feature a scalar field $\phi$ with a quasi scale invariant potential, metastable at $\phi=0$, can remain trapped, during cosmic evolution, in the `wrong' vacuum because the process of bubble nucleation to the true vacuum is…
We calculate the bispectrum of the gravitational field fluctuations generated during warm inflation, where dissipation of the vacuum potential during inflation is the mechanism for structure formation. The bispectrum is non--zero because of…
It is widely accepted that the Universe underwent a period of thermal equilibrium at very early times. One expects a residue of this primordial state to be imprinted on the large scale structure of space time. In this paper we study the…
Quantum gravity computations suggest the existence of an ultraviolet and an infrared fixed point where quantum scale invariance emerges as an exact symmetry. We discuss a particular variable gravity model for the crossover between these…
Recent study [1] has suggested that warm inflation may be realized with a minimal extension of the Standard Model by a single scalar inflaton field with an axion-like coupling to gluons. Motivated by this framework, we investigate the…
We study the properties of the gravitational wave (GW) signals produced by first order phase transitions during the inflation era. We show that the power spectrum of the GW oscillates with its wave number. This signal can be observed…
Assuming that inflation is followed by a phase where the energy density of the Universe is dominated by a component with a general equation of state, we evaluate the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves induced in the…
We argue that primordial gravitational waves have a spectral break and its information is quite useful for exploring the early universe. Indeed, such a spectral break can be a fingerprint of the end of inflation, and the amplitude and the…
During or towards the end of inflation, the Standard Model (SM) Higgs forms a condensate with a large amplitude. Following inflation, the condensate oscillates, decaying non-perturbatively into the rest of the SM species. The resulting…
In the instant preheating scenario efficient particle production occurs immediately following the period of inflationary expansion in the early Universe. We demonstrate that instant preheating predicts unique gravitational wave (GW) signals…
In this work we shall study a possible pre-inflationary scenario for our Universe and how this might be realized by $f(R)$ gravity. Specifically, we shall introduce a scenario in which the Universe in the pre-inflationary era contracts…