Related papers: CMB constraints on monodromy inflation at strong c…
Diffusion damping of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum results from imperfect photon-baryon coupling in the pre-recombination plasma. At redshift $5 \times 10^4 < z < 2 \times 10^6$, the plasma acquires an effective…
String theory models of axion monodromy inflation exhibit scalar potentials which are quadratic for small values of the inflaton field and evolve to a more complicated function for large field values. Oftentimes the large field behaviour is…
In order to gain new insights into the gauge field couplings in the early universe, we consider the constraints on gauge field production during inflation imposed by requiring that their effect on the CMB anisotropies are subdominant. In…
We investigate multi-field inflationary scenarios with fields that drop out of the model in a staggered fashion. This feature is natural in certain multi-field inflationary setups within string theory; for instance, it can manifest itself…
Simple monomial inflationary scenarios have been ruled out by recent observations. In this work we revisit the next simplest scenario, a single--field model where the scalar potential is a polynomial of degree four which features a concave…
We study power law inflation (PLI) with a monomial potential and find a novel exact solution. It is well known that conventional PLI with exponential potential is inconsistent with the Planck data. Unlike the standard PLI, present model…
Signatures of heavy particles during inflation are exponentially suppressed by the Boltzmann factor when the masses are far above the Hubble scale. In more realistic scenarios, however, scale-dependent features may change this conventional…
In this work, we investigate warm inflationary models in the context of a general scalar-tensor theory of gravity which is coupled to radiation through a dissipation term. We first derive the potential of exponential and hyperbolic tangent…
The 2015 Planck data release tightened the region of the allowed inflationary models. Inflationary models with convex potentials have now been ruled out since they produce a large tensor to scalar ratio. Meanwhile the same data offers…
In this note we show that models of natural inflation based on closed string axions are incompatible with the weak gravity conjecture (WGC). Specifically, we use T-duality in order to map the bounds on the charge-to-mass ratio of particles…
We explore a class of effective field theory models of cosmic acceleration involving a metric and a single scalar field. These models can be obtained by starting with a set of ultralight pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone bosons whose couplings to…
We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The…
We outline the expected constraints on non-Gaussianity from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with current and future experiments, focusing on both the third (f_{NL}) and fourth-order (g_{NL} and \tau_{NL}) amplitudes of the local…
We examine the constraints on F-term hybrid inflation by considering the flat directions in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). We find that some coupling terms between the flat direction fields and the field which dominates…
In light of the recent Planck 2015 results for the measurement of the CMB anisotropy, we study simple inflationary models in the context of the Gauss-Bonnet brane-world cosmology. The brane-world cosmological effect modifies the power…
The validity of warm inflation is investigated in the light of recent CMB missions in both strong and weak dissipative regimes. The tensor to scalar ratio of various inflationary models is found to be consistent with the recent CMB results…
The detection of B-mode power spectrum by the BICEP2 collaboration constrains the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ for the lensed-$\Lambda$CDM model. The consistency of this big value with the {\em Planck} results requires a…
During inflation, massive fields can contribute to the power spectrum of curvature perturbation via a dimension-5 operator. This contribution can be considered as a bias for the program of using $n_s$ and $r$ to select inflation models.…
Single-field models of accelerated expansion with nearly flat potentials, despite being able to provide observationally viable explanations for the early-time cosmic inflation and the late-time cosmic acceleration, are in strong tension…
We consider observational limits on a proposed model of the string landscape in inflation. In this scenario, effects from the decoherence of entangled quantum states in long-wavelength modes in the universe result in modifications to the…