Related papers: Cosmological Particle Production and Pairwise Hots…
Particles with masses much larger than the inflationary Hubble scale, $H_I$, can be pair-produced non-adiabatically during inflation. Due to their large masses, the produced particles modify the curvature perturbation around their…
Non-adiabatic production of massive particles is a generic feature of many inflationary mechanisms. If sufficiently massive, these particles can leave features in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) that are not well-captured by…
Following Philcox et al. (2025), we investigate a scenario with a massive partner to the inflaton ($O(100)$ times the inflationary Hubble scale), in which particles are produced during a narrow time period, leaving characteristic hot- or…
Massive particles produced during inflation impact soft limits of primordial correlators. Searching for these signatures presents an exciting opportunity to uncover the particle spectrum in the inflationary epoch. We present…
The observed power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which predicts a nearly scale-invariant power spectrum of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field as they exit the Hubble…
We investigate the possibility that a heavy scalar field, whose mass exceeds the Hubble scale during inflation, could leave non-negligible signatures in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropy power spectrum through the…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations are used to constrain reheating to Standard Model (SM) particles after a period of inflation. As a light spectator field, the SM Higgs boson acquires large field values from its quantum…
Using the techniques of out-of-equilibrium field theory, we study the influence on the properties of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation on observable scales coming from fluctuations corresponding today to scales much…
The recent Planck results and future releases on the horizon present a key opportunity to address a fundamental question in inflationary cosmology of whether primordial density perturbations have a quantum or thermal origin, i.e. whether…
A class of inflationary models that involve rapid bursts of particle productions predict observational signatures, such as bump-like features in the primordial scalar power spectrum. In this work, we analyze such models by comparing their…
We consider a cosmological model in which the tensor mode becomes massive during inflation, and study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature and polarization bispectra arising from the mixing between the scalar mode and the…
We investigate the gravitational production of a scalar field $\chi$ with a mass exceeding the Hubble scale during inflation $m_\chi \gtrsim H_I$, employing both analytical and numerical approaches. We demonstrate that the steepest descent…
In cosmological models where local cosmic strings are formed at the end of a period of inflation, the perturbations are seeded both by the defects and by the quantum fluctuations. In a subset of these models, for example those based on…
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)…
We show that models of new particle physics containing massless pseudoscalar fields super-weakly coupled to photons can be very efficiently probed with CMB polarization anisotropies. The stochastic pseudoscalar fluctuations generated during…
Detailed analyses of the WMAP data indicate possible oscillatory features in the primordial curvature perturbation, which moreover appears to be suppressed beyond the present Hubble radius. Such deviations from the usual inflationary…
We investigate the gravitational production of superheavy scalar fields with nonminimal coupling during and after inflation. We derive analytical approximations using the mode function solution in a de Sitter background and also apply the…
We investigate the formation of large peaks in the inflationary curvature power spectrum from double-well potentials. In such scenarios, the initial CMB spectrum is created at large field values. Subsequently, the inflaton will cross one of…
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…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…