Related papers: Lorentz violating inflation and the Swampland
The current status of early universe cosmology can be summarized as precision, but inherently limited, data requiring explanation from precision and robust theory. Specifically inflation is presently the single concrete hope for solving the…
Using the dS/QFT correspondence in the context of inflation allows for the study of interesting, otherwise inaccessible physics. In particular, by studying inflation via its dual field theory at the boundary of the de Sitter space, it may…
A non-conformally invariant coupling between the inflaton and the photon in the minimal Lorentz-violating standard model extension is analyzed. For specific forms of the Lorentz-violating background tensor, the strong-coupling and…
The difficulty of building metastable vacua in string theory has led some to conjecture that, in the string theory landscape, potentials satisfy $\left|\nabla V/V\right|\geq c\sim \mathcal{O}(1)$. This condition, which is supported by…
We review recent trends on inflationary dynamics in the context of viable modified gravity theories. After providing a general overview of the inflationary paradigm emphasizing on what problems of hot Big Bang theory inflation solves, and a…
Warm Inflation seems to be the most befitting single-field slow-roll inflation scenario in the context of the recently proposed Swampland Criteria. We investigate the constraints these Swampland Criteria impose on Warm Inflation parameters…
In scale-invariant models of fundamental physics, mass scales are generated by spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this work, we study inflation in scale-invariant $R^2$ gravity, in which the Planck mass is generated by a scalar field, which…
We study the dynamics and observational predictions of warm inflation within a supersymmetric distributed mass model. This dissipative mechanism is well described by the interactions between the inflaton and a tower of chiral multiplets…
We obtain cosmological constraints on models of inflation which exhibit rapid roll solutions. Rapid roll attractors exist for potentials with large mass terms and are thus of interest for inflationary model building within string theory. We…
The theory of cosmological perturbations is the main tool which connects theories of the early universe (based on new fundamental physics such as string theory) with cosmological observations. In these lectures, I will provide an…
We analyse the self-consistency of inflation in the Standard Model, where the Higgs field has a large non-minimal coupling to gravity. We determine the domain of energies in which this model represents a valid effective field theory as a…
The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology, and - in conjuction with ideas from superstring theory - has led to speculations about an "inflationary multiverse". From a point of view of phenomenology, the…
We present a model of inflation where the inflaton is accommodated as a phantom field which exhibits an initial transient pole behavior and then decays into a quintessence field which is responsible for a radiation era. We must stress that…
It has very recently been realized that coupling branes to higher dimensional quantum gravity theories and considering the consistency of what lives on the branes, one is able to understand whether such theories can belong either to the…
We review the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship Conjecture that stems from the Trans-Planckian problem of cosmological perturbations. We analyze the implications and constraints that TCC introduces in different frameworks of…
Despite the fact that experimentally with a high degree of statistical significance only a single Standard Model--like Higgs boson is discovered at the LHC, extended Higgs sectors with multiple scalar fields not excluded by combined fits of…
In this work we examine the Swampland criteria for a specific class of rescaled $f(R)$ gravitational models, that are capable of unifying the primordial era of the Universe with the late-time era with the inclusion of string corrections. In…
This thesis is centered on three main subjects within the theory of inflation and cosmological perturbations: loop corrections to the power spectrum of curvature fluctuations generated during inflation; evolution of cosmological…
An interacting scalar field with largish coupling to curvature can support a distinctive inflationary universe scenario. Previously this has been discussed for the Standard Model Higgs field, treated classically or in a leading log…
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…