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Our universe may have formed via bubble nucleation in an eternally-inflating background. Furthermore, the background may have a compact dimension--the modulus of which tunnels out of a metastable minimum during bubble nucleation--which…
In low scale quantum gravity scenarios the fundamental scale of nature can be as low as TeV, in order to address the naturalness of the electroweak scale. A number of difficulties arise in constructing specific models; stabilisation of the…
We consider the impact of quantum diffusion on inflationary dynamics during an ultra-slow-roll phase, which can be of particular significance for the formation of primordial black holes. We show, by means of a fully analytical approach,…
Inflation generates gravitational waves, which may be observable in the low multipoles of the cosmic microwave background (cmb) anisotropy but only if the inflaton field variation is at least of order the Planck scale. Such a large…
In loop quantum cosmology, the universe avoids a big bang singularity and undergoes an early and short super-inflation phase. During super-inflation, non-perturbative quantum corrections to the dynamics drive an inflaton field up its…
We propose that cosmological density perturbation may originate from passive fluctuations of the inflaton, which are induced by colored quantum noise due to the coupling of the inflaton to the quantum environment. At small scales, the…
We study multifield contributions to the scalar power spectrum in an ensemble of six-field inflationary models obtained in string theory. We identify examples in which inflation occurs by chance, near an approximate inflection point, and we…
We develop in this thesis the principles governing the production of our universe's primordial inhomogeneities during its early phase of inflation. As a guiding thread we ask what physics during inflation can lead to perturbations so large…
We investigate the quantum fluctuations of an inflaton field in a two-field model of one-bubble open inflation. One of the inflatons is assumed to be responsible for the first false vacuum stage of inflation and the other is assumed to be…
How well can we constrain the initial quantum state of metric perturbations sourced during inflation? We exhibit an interesting new class of quantum states that entangle the scalar metric perturbations {\zeta} with other fields such as…
The discovery of gravitational waves from merging binary black holes has generated considerable interest in examining whether these black holes could have a primordial origin. If a significant number of black holes have to be produced in…
Observational missions have provided us with a reliable model of the evolution of the universe starting from the last scattering surface all the way to future infinity. Furthermore given a specific model of inflation, using quantum field…
During cosmological inflation, it has been suggested that fields coupled to the inflaton can be excited by the slow-rolling inflaton into a quasi-stable non-vacuum state. Within this scenario of ``warm inflation'', this could allow for a…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
It is an interesting question whether low energy degrees of freedom may be responsible for early universe inflation. To examine this, here we present a simple version of Higgs-inflation with minimal coupling to gravity and a quadratic…
The quantum gravitational scale of inflation is calculated by finding a sharp probability peak in the distribution function of chaotic inflationary cosmologies driven by a scalar field with large negative constant $\xi$ of nonminimal…
Detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background indicate the large-scale homogeneity of the universe. On very small scales, we observe however inhomogeneities such as galaxies, stars, planets and ourselves. In the context of hot…
A new class of gravity-matter model defined with an independent non-Riemannian volume form is studied, in the second order formalism. The action has a global scale invariance symmetry, which can be broken by the equation of motion of the…
If the beginning of inflation is defined at the moment when the vacuum energy of the inflaton starts to dominate, the energy density of the other fields at that moment is (by definition) comparable to the inflaton. Although the fraction…
We study stochastic inflation in the presence of a dynamical gravitational constant. We describe the Arnowitt--Deser--Misner formalism for Jordan--Brans--Dicke theory of gravity with an inflaton field. The inflaton and dilaton scalar fields…