Related papers: Kination cosmology from scalar fields and gravitat…
It is well-known that the primordial scalar curvature and tensor perturbations, $\zeta$ and $\gamma_{ij}$, are conserved on super-horizon scales in minimal inflation models. However, their wave functional has a rapidly oscillating phase…
Cosmological B-L breaking is a natural and testable mechanism to generate the initial conditions of the hot early universe. If B-L is broken at the grand unification scale, the false vacuum phase drives hybrid inflation, ending in tachyonic…
We discuss the implications of purely classical, instead of quantum, theory of gravity for the gravitational wave spectrum generated during inflation. We show that a positive detection of primordial gravitational waves will no longer…
Primordial gravitational waves (PGWs) generate scalar density perturbations at second order. Since the induced density contrast is quadratic in the tensor field, it is intrinsically non-Gaussian. We study the imprint of this tensor-induced…
We discuss the cosmological evolution of gravitational waves (GWs) after inflation in a brane-world cosmology embedded in five-dimensional anti-de Sitter (AdS_5) bulk spacetime. In a brane-world scenario, the evolution of GWs is affected by…
The non-thermal production of dark matter (DM) usually requires very tiny couplings of the dark sector with the visible sector and therefore is notoriously challenging to hunt in laboratory experiments. Here we propose a novel pathway to…
In the presence of spacetime torsion, any generic $f(R)$ model of gravity is conformally dual to a scalar-tensor theory augmented with a second rank antisymmetric massless degree of freedom. We investigate the stochastic gravitational wave…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
In this work, we elaborate further on a cosmological model of inflation that characterises Chern-Simons (CS) gravity models inspired from string theory. Such models are known to belong to the class of the so-called String-Inspired Running…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
It is well-known that first order phase transitions in the early universe can be a powerful source of observable stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds. Any such gravitational wave background must exhibit large-scale anisotropies at…
We study stochastic gravitational waves generated in a post-inflationary magnetogenesis scenario with time-dependent gauge couplings during inflation and reheating. In this setup, magnetic anisotropic stress directly sources gravitational…
I review a (3+1)-dimensional, string-inspired cosmological model with gravitational anomalies (of Chern-Simons (CS) type) at early epochs, and a totally-antisymmetric torsion, dual to a massless axion-like field ("gravitational axion"),…
Several alternative ways to quantize gravitational interactions seem to indicate that gravity at short distances is effectively two-dimensional. If this were true, and the energy scale at which the dimensional transition occurs is of the…
Identifying dark matter candidates that simultaneously generate multiple observable cosmological signatures is a key goal in connecting particle physics with upcoming observations. Axion-like particles coupled to the Standard Model photon…
A cosmic string network created during an inflationary stage in the early Universe - here defined as i-string network - is expected to enter a transient stretching regime during inflation, in which its characteristic length is stretched to…
We discuss a cosmological scenario with a stochastic background of gravitational waves sourced by the tensor perturbation due to a hybrid inflationary model with cubic potential. The tensor-to-scalar ratio for the present hybrid…
We find the spectrum P(w)dw of the gravitational wave background produced in the early universe in string theory. We work in the framework of String Driven Cosmology, whose scale factors are computed with the low-energy effective string…
The reheating phase after inflation is one of the least observationally constrained epochs in the evolution of the Universe. The forthcoming gravitational wave observatories will enable us to constrain at least some of the non-standard…
We discuss a scenario in which extra dimensional effects allow a scalar field with a steep potential to play the dual role of the inflaton as well as dark energy (quintessence). The post-inflationary evolution of the universe in this…