Related papers: The Stochastic Relaxion
Cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale is an attractive scenario addressing the gauge hierarchy problem. Its main actor, the relaxion, is a light spin-zero field which dynamically relaxes the Higgs mass with respect to its natural…
We revisit the idea that the inflaton may have dissipated part of its energy into a thermal bath during inflation, considering monomial inflationary potentials and three different forms of dissipation rate. Using a numerical Fokker-Planck…
We discuss the inflaton $\phi$ in an interaction with an infinite number of fields treated as an environment (noise) with a friction $\gamma^{2}>0$. In a Markovian approximation we obtain a stochastic wave equation (appearing also in the…
Fluctuations play a critical role in cosmology. They are relevant across a range of phenomena from the dynamics of inflation to the formation of structure. In many cases, these fluctuations are coarse grained and follow a Gaussian…
We examine the necessity of requiring that relaxion dynamics is dominated by classical slow roll and not quantum fluctuations. It has been recently proposed by Nelson and Prescod-Weinstein that abandoning this requirement can lead to a…
The relaxation towards equilibrium of systems with long range interactions is not yet fully understood. As a step towards such a comprehension, we propose the study of the dynamical equilibrium fluctuations in a model system with long range…
We demonstrate that the strict upper bounds on the energy scale of inflation and on the tensor-to-scalar ratio can be somewhat relaxed if we assume that - after an initial period of slow rolling when scales probed today in CMB experiments…
At the level of heuristic effective dynamics, we investigate the cosmological inflation with holonomy corrections of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) in the $k=0$ Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model with a single inflaton field subject to a simple…
We analyse the dynamics of spinodal decomposition in inflationary cosmology using the closed time path formalism of out of equilibrium quantum field theory combined with the non-perturbative Hartree approximation. In addition to a general…
The implementation of a Planck-scale high frequency and short wavelength cutoff in quantum theories on expanding backgrounds may have potentially nontrivial implications, such as the breaking of local Lorentz invariance and the existence of…
A Schroedinger picture analysis of time dependent quantum oscillators, in a manner of Guth and Pi, clearly identifies two physical mechanisms for possible decoherence of vacuum fluctuations in early universe: turning of quantum oscillators…
The dynamics of a degree of freedom associated to an axial vector in contact with a heat bath is decribed by means of a probability distribution function obeying a Fokker-Planck equation. The equation is derived by using mesoscopic…
We consider the classical wave equation with a thermal and Starobinsky-Vilenkin noise which in a slow-roll and long wave approximation describes the quantum fluctuations of the graviton-inflaton system in an expanding metric. We investigate…
We study the evolution of spatially flat Friedmann-Lema\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker universe for chaotic and Starobinsky potentials in the framework of modified loop quantum cosmologies. These models result in a non-singular bounce as in loop…
We reinterpret Starobinsky's stochastic inflation as an open quantum system, where short-wavelength modes act as the environment for long-wavelength modes. Using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism, we systematically trace out the environment…
A new relaxion mechanism is proposed where a small electroweak scale is preferably selected earlier than the larger one due to a potential instability, which is different from previously proposed stopping mechanisms by either Hubble…
While moving down the potential on its classical slow roll trajectory, the inflaton field is subject to quantum jumps, which take it up or down the potential at random. In "stochastic inflation", the impact of these quantum jumps is modeled…
The stochastic approach aims at describing the long-wavelength part of quantum fields during inflation by a classical stochastic theory. It is usually formulated in terms of Langevin equations, giving rise to a Fokker-Planck equation for…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
We study the problem of initial conditions for slow-roll inflation along a plateau-like scalar potential within the framework of fluctuation-dissipation dynamics. We consider, in particular, that inflation was preceded by a…