Related papers: Scalaron Decay in Perturbative Quantum Gravity
We formulate new conformal models of inflation and dark energy which generalise the Higgs-Dilaton scenario. We embed these models in unimodular gravity whose effect is to break scale invariance in the late time Universe. In the early…
We show that there are inflationary models for which perturbations in the energy momentum tensor, which are of second order in the scalar field, cannot be neglected. We first specify the conditions under which the usual first order…
Inflation and quintessence can both be described by a single scalar field. The cosmic time evolution of this cosmon field realizes a crossover from the region of an ultraviolet fixed point in the infinite past to an infrared fixed point in…
The curvaton and the inhomogeneous reheating scenarios for the generation of the cosmological curvature perturbation on large scales represent an alternative to the standard slow-roll scenario where the observed density perturbations are…
Recent study [1] has suggested that warm inflation may be realized with a minimal extension of the Standard Model by a single scalar inflaton field with an axion-like coupling to gluons. Motivated by this framework, we investigate the…
Reheating after inflation can proceed even if the inflaton couples to Standard Model (SM) particles only gravitationally. However, particle production during the transition between de-Sitter expansion and a decelerating Universe is rather…
A variety of mechanisms in the early Universe lead to the generation of gravitational waves (GWs). We introduce here a novel source of GWs generated by vacuum fluctuations after inflation. Given that gravitons are minimally coupled…
In this paper, we investigate a scenario of variable gravity and apply it to the unified description of inflation and late time cosmic acceleration dubbed quintessential inflation. The scalar field called "cosmon" which in this model…
We study a model for reheating that has been much investigated for parametric resonance, having a quartic interaction of the scalar inflaton with another scalar field. Attention is particularly on the quantum excitations of the inflaton…
There might be a light scalar field during inflation which is not responsible for the accelerating inflationary expansion. Then, its quantum fluctuation is stretched during inflation. This scalar field could be a curvaton, if it decays at a…
Recently, it was proposed that a small true vacuum universe can inflate spontaneously, in principle. Furthermore, there should be matter creation in vacuum inflation due to quantum fluctuations, and the matter created will influence the…
We consider an inflationary model in the hidden-sector broken supergravity with an effectively large cutoff. The inflaton decay into right-handed neutrinos naturally causes the observed baryon asymmetry of the universe with a reheating…
We consider one-loop thermal effects on the decay of a scalar field zero mode initially dominating the energy density of the universe. We assume fermionic decay channels and take into account the effects due to both particle and hole…
The (large-scale) structures we observe in the Universe are classical, but within the inflationary scenario they do originate from quantum fluctuations. This leads to the question: ''How did this quantum-to-classical transition occur?''. A…
We consider the presence and evolution of primordial density perturbations in a cosmological model based on a simple ansatz which captures -- by providing a set of effective gravitational field equations -- the strength of the enhanced…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
Inflation is often described through the dynamics of a scalar field, slow-rolling in a suitable potential. Ultimately, this inflaton must be identified as the expectation value of a quantum field, evolving in a quantum effective potential.…
We construct a model of quintessential inflation in Palatini $R^2$ gravity employing a scalar field with a simple exponential potential and coupled to gravity with a running non-minimal coupling. At early times, the field acts as the…
We consider a scenario where the scalaron of $f({\cal R})$ models is related to the volume modulus of string compactifications leaving only one scalar degree of freedom at low energy. The coefficient of the leading curvature squared…
The physics of the inflationary universe requires the study of the out of equilibrium evolution of quantum fields in curved spacetime. We present the evolution for both the geometry and the matter (described by the quantum inflaton field)…