Related papers: Cornering Extended Starobinsky Inflation with CMB …
This White Paper for the CNRS IN2P3 Prospective 2020 focuses on realistic and timely situations of inflation in connection with the CMB, gravitational and particle physics, adding inter-disciplinarity and unification values within a…
We present cosmological constraints from Planck 2015 data for a universe that is kinetically dominated at very early times. We perform a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis to estimate parameters and use nested sampling to determine the…
The recent Planck results and future releases on the horizon present a key opportunity to address a fundamental question in inflationary cosmology of whether primordial density perturbations have a quantum or thermal origin, i.e. whether…
We discuss the soundness of inflationary scenarios in theories beyond the Starobinsky model, namely a class of theories described by arbitrary functions of the Ricci scalar and the K-essence field. We discuss the pathologies associated with…
We explore the potential use of the Radio Continuum (RC) survey conducted by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) to remove (delens) the lensing-induced B-mode polarization and thus enhance future cosmic microwave background (CMB) searches for…
The curl-modes of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization probe horizon-scale primordial gravitational waves related to inflation. A significant source of confusion is expected from a lensing conversion of polarization related to…
In this work we revisit power law, $\frac{1}{M^2}R^\beta$, inflation to find the deviations from $R^2$ inflation allowed by current CMB and LSS observations. We compute the power spectra for scalar and tensor perturbations numerically and…
The magnitude of B-mode polarization in the cosmic microwave background as measured by BICEP2 favours models of chaotic inflation with a quadratic $m^2 \phi^2/2$ potential, whereas data from the Planck satellite favour a small value of the…
Cosmological production of scalar, non-minimally coupled dark matter depends on the specifics of the inflationary model under consideration. We analyze both Starobinsky inflation and a quadratic potential, solve the full background…
This work focuses on particle production described by a nonminimally coupled model during inflation. In this model, three parameters determine the characteristic frequency and strength of the induced gravitational waves (GWs). Considering…
We compute corrections to the inflationary potential due to conformally coupled non-relativistic matter. We find that under certain conditions of the matter coupling, inflation may be interrupted abruptly. We display this in the…
The recent detection by the BICEP2 collaboration of a high level of tensor modes seems to exclude the Starobinsky model of inflation. In this paper we show that this conclusion can be avoided: one can embed the Starobinsky model in…
This paper investigates Starobinsky's model of inflation driven by the trace anomaly of conformally coupled matter fields. This model does not suffer from the problem of contrived initial conditions that occurs in most models of inflation…
It is well known that in manifestly Lorentz invariant theories with nontrivial kinetic terms, perturbations around some classical backgrounds can travel faster than light. These exotic "supersonic" models may have interesting consequences…
We investigate the degree to which the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) can be used to constrain primordial non-Gaussianity coming from the presence of spinning particles coupled to the inflaton. We compute the $\langle TTT \rangle$ and…
Measurements of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy have served as the best experimental probe of the early universe to date. The inflationary paradigm, inspired in part by the extreme isotropy of the CMB, is now a cornerstone in…
During inflation explicit perturbative computations of quantum field theories which contain massless, non-conformal fields exhibit secular effects that grow as powers of the logarithm of the inflationary scale factor. Starobinskii's…
Is there new physics hidden in the four-point function of the cosmic microwave background (CMB)? We conduct a detailed analysis of the Planck PR4 temperature and polarization trispectrum for $\ell\in[2,2048]$. Using the theoretical and…
A supergravity extension of the $(R+R^2)$ gravity with the additional (Born-Infeld) structure of a massive vector multiplet gives rise to the specific $F(R)$ gravity, whose structure is investigated in detail. The massive vector multiplet…
Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…