Related papers: The Inflation Attention Threshold and Inflation Su…
We consider models of inflection point inflation. The main drawback of such models is that they suffer from the overshoot problem. Namely the initial condition should be fine tuned to be near the inflection point for the universe to…
March 2020 confinement has shot Portuguese savings to historic levels, reaching 13.4% of gross disposable income in early 2021 (INE, 2023). To find similar savings figures we need to go back to 1999. With consumption reduced to a bare…
The expansion of the Universe is understood to have accelerated during two epochs: in its very first moments during a period of Inflation and much more recently, at $z < 1$, when Dark Energy is hypothesized to drive cosmic acceleration. The…
In hybrid inflationary models, inflation ends by a sudden instability associated with a steep ridge in the potential. Here we argue that this feature can generate a large contribution to the curvature perturbation on observable scales. This…
We review locked inflation and we critically address phenomenological and consistency issues thathave appeared in the literature. A natural window of opportunity is found for the original scenario.Moreover, a simple way to enlarge the…
In single clock models of inflation the coupling between modes of very different scales does not have any significant dynamical effect during inflation. It leads to interesting projection effects. Larger and smaller modes change the…
In inflationary scenarios with more than one scalar field, inflation may proceed even if each of the individual fields has a potential too steep for that field to sustain inflation on its own. We show that scalar fields with exponential…
We investigate brane inflation driven by two stacks of mobile branes in a throat. The stack closest to the bottom of the throat annihilates first with antibranes, resulting in particle production and a change of the equation of state…
During the last ten years a detailed investigation of preheating was performed for chaotic inflation and for hybrid inflation. However, nonperturbative effects during reheating in the new inflation scenario remained practically unexplored.…
BICEP2's detection on the primordial B-mode of CMB polarization suggests that inflation occurred around GUT scale, with the tensor-to-scalar ratio r~0.2. Inspired by this discosvery, we study the topological inflation which was driven by a…
In double-field inflation, which exploits two scalar fields, one of the fields rolls slowly during inflation whereas the other field is trapped in a meta-stable vacuum. The nucleation rate from the false vacuum to the true one becomes…
With present and future observations becoming of higher and higher quality, it is timely and necessary to investigate the most significant theoretical uncertainties in the predictions of inflation. We show that our ignorance of the entire…
We investigate the possibility that the amplitude of scalar density perturbations may be damped after inflation. This would imply that CMB anisotropies do not uniquely fix the amplitude of the perturbations generated during inflation and…
We consider the running of the spectral index as a probe of both inflation itself, and of the overall evolution of the very early universe. Surveying a collection of simple single field inflationary models, we confirm that the magnitude of…
The single scalar field inflationary models that lead to scalar and tensor perturbation spectra with amplitudes varying in direct proportion to one another are reconstructed by solving the Stewart-Lyth inverse problem to next-to-leading…
We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…
Motivated by the string landscape we examine scenarios for which inflation is a two-step process, with a comparatively short inflationary epoch near the string scale and a longer period at a much lower energy (like the TeV scale). We…
In this paper we reconsider the supersymmetric hybrid inflation in the context of the braneworld scenario . The observational bounds are satisfied with an inflationary energy scale $\mu\simeq 4\times 10^{-4}M_p$, without any fine-tuning of…
The most important criteria for a successful inflation are to explain the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the Standard Model quarks and…
Usually inflation ends either by a slow rolling of the inflaton field, which gradually becomes faster and faster, or by a first-order phase transition. We describe a model where inflation ends in a different way, due to a very rapid rolling…