Related papers: Growth of power spectrum due to decrease of sound …
The decrease of both the rolling speed of the inflaton and the sound speed of the curvature perturbations can amplify the curvature perturbations during inflation so as to generate a sizable amount of primordial black holes. In the…
The possibility that primordial black holes constitute a fraction of dark matter motivates a detailed study of possible mechanisms for their production. Black holes can form by the collapse of primordial curvature fluctuations, if the…
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…
We study the effects of sudden change in the sound velocity on primordial curvature perturbation spectrum in inflationary cosmology, assuming that the background evolution satisfies the slow-roll condition throughout. It is found that the…
The next generation of cosmic microwave background, gravitational wave, and large scale structure, experiments will provide an unprecedented opportunity to probe the primordial power spectrum on small scales. An exciting possibility for…
[Abridged] The primordial scalar power spectrum is well constrained on large scales, primarily by the observations of the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Over the last few years, it has been recognized that a sharp…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
We discuss features of the inflaton potential that can lead to a strong enhancement of the power spectrum of curvature perturbations. We show that a steep decrease of the potential induces an enhancement of the spectrum by several orders of…
We study single-field inflationary models with steep step-like features in the potential that lead to the temporary violation of the slow-roll conditions during the evolution of the inflaton. These features enhance the power spectrum of the…
We propose a simple analytic fit for the power spectrum of scalar (curvature) perturbations during inflation, in order to describe slow roll of inflaton and formation of primordial black holes in the early universe, in the framework of…
We derive analytic bounds on the shape of the primordial power spectrum in the context of single-field inflation. In particular, the steepest possible growth has a spectral index of $n_s - 1 = 4$ once transients have died down. Its primary…
Recently, it has been claimed that inflationary models with an inflection point in the scalar potential can produce a large resonance in the power spectrum of curvature perturbation. In this paper however we show that the previous analyses…
We apply the in-in formalism to address the question of whether the size of the one-loop spectrum of curvature fluctuations in ultra-slow-roll inflation models designed for producing a large population of primordial black holes implies a…
We study a possible amplification mechanism for the curvature perturbations generated during inflation by a Dirac-Born-Infeld (DBI) inflaton in the presence of a sharp feature in the warp factor. The large growth resulting in the scalar…
The observed power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which predicts a nearly scale-invariant power spectrum of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field as they exit the Hubble…
We investigate a model of $R^2$-gravity with a non-minimally coupled scalar field that gives rise to two-stage inflation with a break, that is, with an intermediate stage where inflation momentarily halts. We find that the power spectrum of…
Single field inflationary models that seek to greatly enhance small scale power in order to form primordial black holes predict both a squeezed bispectrum that is enhanced by this small scale power and a potentially detectable enhancement…
We compute the power spectrum of curvature perturbations in stochastic inflation. This combines the distribution of first crossing times through the end-of-inflation surface, which has been previously studied, with the distribution of the…
We employ the formalism of the effective field theory of inflation to study the effects of a sudden change in the speed of sound of the inflationary perturbations. Such an event generates a feature with high frequency oscillations both in…