Related papers: Missing Scalars at the Cosmological Collider
Cosmological models often contain scalar fields, which can acquire global nonzero expectation values that change with the comoving time. Among the possible consequences of these scalar-field backgrounds, an accelerated cosmological…
Attempts at building an unified description of the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions usually involve several stages of spontaneous symmetry breaking. We consider the effects of such symmetry breaking during an era of primordial…
The density perturbations generated when the inflaton decay rate is perturbed by a light scalar field $\chi$ are studied. By explicitly solving the perturbation equations for the system of two scalar fields and radiation, we show that even…
A cosmic scalar field evolving very slowly in time can account for the observed dark energy of the Universe. Unlike a cosmological constant, an evolving scalar field also has local spatial gradients due to gravity. If the scalar field has a…
We revisit the issue on signatures of pre-inflationary background anisotropy by considering the quantization of a massless and minimally coupled scalar field in an axially symmetric Kasner background, mimicking cosmological perturbations.…
We investigate the possibility of the inflation driven by a Lorentz invariant non-standard spinor field. As these spinors are having dominant interaction via gravitational field only, they are considered as \emph{Dark Spinors}. We study how…
Ghost inflation is a well-known framework in which cosmological fluctuations can generate enhanced primordial non-Gaussianity, typically of the equilateral type. In its original form, however, it is in tension with current observational…
The interplay between cosmology and strongly coupled dynamics can yield transient spectral features that vanish at late times, but which may leave behind phenomenological signatures in the spectrum of primordial fluctuations. Of particular…
Primordial non-Gaussianity generated by additional fields during inflation offers a compelling observational target. Heavy fields imprint characteristic oscillatory signals in non-Gaussian correlation functions of the inflaton, a process…
In this article we investigate the effects of single derivative mixing in massive bosonic fields. In the regime of large mixing, we show that this leads to striking changes of the field dynamics, delaying the onset of classical oscillations…
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…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
Recently, attempts have been made to understand the apparent near coincidence of the present dark energy and matter energy in terms of a dynamical attractor-like solution for the evolution of a scalar field. In these models the field…
If the expansion of the early Universe was not close to de Sitter, the statistical imprints of the primordial density perturbation on the cosmic microwave background can be quite different from those derived in slow-roll inflation. In this…
A weakly coupled scalar field $\Phi$ with a simple exponential potential $V=M_P^4\exp(-\lambda\Phi/M_P)$ where $M_P$ is the reduced Planck mass, and $\lambda > 2$, has an attractor solution in a radiation or matter dominated universe in…
Diverse cosmological and astrophysical observations strongly hint at the presence of dark matter and dark energy in the Universe. One of the main goals of Cosmology is to explain the nature of these two components. It may well be that both…
We consider the dynamics of massive spinning fields during inflation and the resulting signatures in the cosmological correlators of inflaton perturbations computed in the Poincar\'e patch of de Sitter space. There are (at least) two ways…
We consider scalar perturbations of energy-density for a class of cosmological models where an early phase of accelerated expansion evolves, without any fine-tuning for graceful exit, towards the standard Friedman eras of observed universe.…
Motivated by their potential role as dark matter, we study the cosmological evolution of light scalar and vector fields non-minimally coupled to gravity. Our focus is on a situation where the dominant contribution to the energy density…
The basic properties of oscillons -- localized, long-lived, time-dependent scalar field configurations -- are briefly reviewed, including recent results demonstrating how their existence depends on the dimensionality of spacetime. Their…