Related papers: Minimal decoherence from inflation
During single clock inflation, hidden fields (i.e. fields coupled to the inflaton only gravitationally) in their adiabatic vacua can ordinarily only affect observables through virtual effects. After renormalizing background quantities…
With an energy scale that can be as high as $10^{14}\,{\rm GeV}$, inflation may provide a unique probe of high-energy physics. Both scalar and tensor fluctuations generated during this early accelerated expansion contain crucial information…
We discuss the principles governing the selection of inflationary models for which preheating can affect the CMB. This is a (fairly small) subset of those models which have non-negligible entropy/isocurvature perturbations on large scales…
A study of the slow-roll inflation for an exponential potential in the frame of the scalar-tensor theory is performed, where non-minimal kinetic coupling to curvature and non-minimal coupling of the scalar field to the Gauss-Bonnet…
Reheating connects the inflationary universe to the radiation-dominated evolution of standard Big Bang cosmology. Due to the lack of direct observations, we rely on indirect bounds on this phase from the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)…
Inflation can occur near a point of inflection in the potential of flat directions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. In this paper we elaborate on the complementarity between the bounds from Cosmic Microwave Background…
The weak gravity conjecture imposes severe constraints on natural inflation. A trans-Planckian axion decay constant can only be realized if the potential exhibits an additional (subdominant) modulation with sub-Planckian periodicity. The…
We calculate the power spectra of primordial curvature and isocurvature perturbations from a general two field inflation model at next-to-leading order correction in a slow-roll expansion. In particular we calculate the spectral indices to…
Inflationary and bouncing scenarios are two frameworks that provide the mechanism to overcome the horizon problem as well as generate the primordial perturbations. In this work, we investigate the conservation of perturbations in…
We show that a corpuscular description of gravity can lead to an inflationary scenario similar to Starobinsky's model without requiring the introduction of the inflaton field. All relevant properties are determined by the number of…
We use holography to study dS-invariant states of non-conformal, strongly coupled quantum field theories in four-dimensional de Sitter space. We show that out-of-equilibrium effects can sustain the exponential inflation within the regime of…
In the first part of this paper, we outline the construction of an inflationary cosmology in the framework where inflation is described by a universally evolving scalar field, with the Lagrangian ${\cal L}_\phi=-{1/2}(\partial\phi)^2…
We obtain effective equations of inflationary dynamics for the mean inflaton and metric fields in the no-boundary and tunneling quantum states of the Universe. In the slow roll approximation (taking the form of the local Schwiger-DeWitt…
We provide an analytical study of the coupling of short and long wavelength fluctuation modes during the initial phase of reheating in two field models like hybrid inflation. In these models, there is - at linear order in perturbation…
We study the decay of scalar fields, in particular the inflaton, into lighter scalars in a De Sitter spacetime background. After providing a practical definition of the rate, we focus on the case of an inflaton interacting with a massless…
In order to go beyond the mean-field approximation, commonly used in the inflationary computations, an identification of the quantum constituents of the inflationary background is made. In particular, the homogeneous scalar field…
The scale at which supersymmetry is broken and the mechanism by which supersymmetry breaking is fed down to the observable sector has rich implications on the way Nature may have chosen to accomplish inflation. We discuss a simple model for…
We discuss the effect of super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations on the locally measured Hubble expansion rate. We consider a large bare cosmological constant in the early universe in the presence of scalar field matter (the dominant matter…
We present an explicit cosmological model where inflation and dark energy both could arise from the dynamics of the same scalar field. We present our discussion in the framework where the inflaton field $\phi$ attains a nearly constant…
Scattering amplitudes at weak coupling are highly constrained by Lorentz invariance, locality and unitarity, and depend on model details only through coupling constants and particle content. In this paper, we develop an understanding of…