Related papers: Positivity from Cosmological Correlators
Single-field models of accelerated expansion with nearly flat potentials, despite being able to provide observationally viable explanations for the early-time cosmic inflation and the late-time cosmic acceleration, are in strong tension…
We construct gravitational modifications that go beyond Horndeski, namely theories with extended nonminimal derivative couplings, in which the coefficient functions depend not only on the scalar field but also on its kinetic energy. Such…
Cosmic strings are the most popular topological defects arising from the spontaneous breaking of fundamental symmetries in the early Universe. They are the source of a number of interesting effects in cosmology and astrophysics. An…
It is well known that string theories naturally compactify on anti-de Sitter spaces, and yet cosmological observations show no evidence of a negative cosmological constant in the early Universe's evolution. In this letter we present two…
We analyze cosmological particle production driven by spacetime expansion in the early universe for homogeneous and isotropic cosmologies with positive, negative, and zero spatial curvature. We prioritize analytical results to gain a deeper…
We show that on the average, homogeneous and isotropic scalar field and on the average homogeneous and isotropic ensembles of classical and quantum gravitational waves generate the de Sitter expansion of the empty (with no matter)…
Study the behaviour and the evolution of the cosmological field equations in an homogeneous and anisotropic spacetime with two scalar fields coupled in the kinetic term. Specifically, the kinetic energy for the scalar field Lagrangian is…
We investigate cosmic censorship in anti-de Sitter space in holographic models in which the ground state is described by a good singularity. These include supersymmetric truncations of string/M-theory, for which a positive-energy theorem…
It is often the case that scalar fields are produced in the early Universe in the form of coherent oscillation. These scalar fields may have huge abundances and affect the evolution of the Universe. In particular, if the lifetime is long…
Speed matters. How the masses and spins of new particles active during inflation can be read off from the statistical properties of primordial density fluctuations is well understood. However, not when the propagation speeds of the new…
Motivated by recent proposals for a de Sitter version of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we give some topological restrictions on spacetimes of de Sitter type, i.e., spacetimes with $\Lambda>0$, which admit a regular past and/or future…
We discuss several aspects of quantum field theory of a scalar field in a Friedmann universe, clarifying and highlighting several conceptual and technical issues. (A) We show that one can map the dynamics of (1) a massless scalar field in a…
We study the dynamics of scalar fields with compact field spaces, or axions, in de Sitter space. We argue that the field space topology can qualitatively affect the physics of these fields beyond just which terms are allowed in their…
A weakly coupled scalar field $\Phi$ with a simple exponential potential $V=M_P^4\exp(-\lambda\Phi/M_P)$ where $M_P$ is the reduced Planck mass, and $\lambda > 2$, has an attractor solution in a radiation or matter dominated universe in…
In hep-th/0506040 we discussed a classically constrained model of gravity. This theory contains known solutions of General Relativity (GR), and admits solutions that are absent in GR. Here we study cosmological implications of some of these…
We study multidimensional gravitational models with scalar curvature nonlinearity of the type 1/R and with form-fields (fluxes) as a matter source. It is assumed that the higher dimensional space-time undergoes Freund-Rubin-like spontaneous…
We consider the consequences of global higher-spin symmetries in quantum field theories on a fixed de Sitter background of spacetime dimension $D \ge 3$. These symmetries enhance the symmetry group associated with the isometries of the de…
The stochastic effective theory approach, often called stochastic inflation, is widely used in cosmology to describe scalar field dynamics during inflation. The existing formulations are, however, more qualitative than quantitative because…
The symmetry group of the de Sitter spacetime, accommodates fields of various masses and spin among its unitary irreducible representations. These unitary representations are labeled by the spin and the weight contribution to the scaling…
Based on random matrix theory, we compute the likelihood of saddles and minima in a class of random potentials that are softly bounded from above and below, as required for the validity of low energy effective theories. Imposing this bound…