Related papers: Implications of a holographic density of states on…
We study the cosmology of a toy modified theory of gravity in which gravity shuts off at short distances, as in the fat graviton scenario of Sundrum. In the weak-field limit, the theory is perturbatively local, ghost-free and unitary,…
A remarkable prediction of the Standard Model is that, in the absence of corrections lifting the energy density, the Higgs potential becomes negative at large field values. If the Higgs field samples this part of the potential during…
Effects caused by an additional massive scalar field interacting with an inflaton field are analyzed. Inflation is shown to have two stages, the first of which is dominant and characterized by ultraslow dynamics of the inflaton field.…
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…
We treat a model in which tensor perturbations of de~Sitter spacetime, represented as a spatially flat model, are modified by the effects of the vacuum fluctuations of a massless conformally invariant field, such as the electromagnetic…
Motivated by the possibility of inflation in the cosmic landscape, which may be approximated by a complicated potential, we study the density perturbations in multi-field inflation with a random potential. The random potential causes the…
We point out that the prediction of the minimal chaotic inflation model is altered if a scalar field takes a large field value close to the Planck scale during inflation due to a negative Hubble induced mass. In particular, we show that the…
We study chaotic inflation driven by a real, massive, homogeneous minimally coupled scalar field in a flat Robertson-Walker spacetime. The semiclassical limit for gravity is considered, whereas the scalar field is treated quantum…
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…
Since inflationary perturbations must generically couple to all degrees of freedom present in the early Universe, it is more realistic to view these fluctuations as an open quantum system interacting with an environment. Then, on very…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
The inflaton field responsible for inflation may not be a canonical fundamental scalar. It is possible that the inflaton is a composite of fermions or it may have a decay width. In these cases the standard procedure for calculating the…
Quantum diffusion describes the inflow of vacuum quantum fluctuations as they get amplified by gravitational instability, and stretched to large distances during inflation. In this picture, the dynamics of the universe's expansion becomes…
We show how, by considering the cumulative effect of tiny quantum gravitational fluctuations over very large distances, it may be possible to: ($a$) reconcile nucleosynthesis bounds on the density parameter of the Universe with the…
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…
According to the holographic bound, there is only a finite density of degrees of freedom in space when gravity is taken into account. Conventional quantum field theory does not conform to this bound, since in this framework, infinitely many…
We apply the holographic principle at the early universe, obtaining an inflation realization of holographic origin. Such a consideration has equal footing with its well-studied late-time application, and moreover the decrease of the…
We consider a generic model of quadratic gravity coupled to a single scalar and investigate the effects of gravitational degrees of freedom on inflationary parameters. We find that quantum corrections arising from the massive spin-2 ghost…
This paper is a major revision of our previous work on the HST model of inflation. We identify the local fluctuations of the metric with fluctuations of the mass and angular momentum of black holes, and show that the consistency conditions…
A semiclassical description of quantum systems is applied to probe the dynamics of the cosmological model of an inflationary universe with quadratic inflaton potential, described in a quantum framework of geometrodynamics. The systematic…