Related papers: Why does inflation look single field to us?
We study how the initial inhomogeneities of the universe affect the onset of inflation in the closed universe. We consider the model of a chaotic inflation which is driven by a massive scalar field. In order to construct an inhomogeneous…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
It is shown that the squeezed limit of inflationary expectation values follows from reparametrization invariance of the wavefunction of the universe. This translates into a constraint on the longitudinal modes of functional derivatives of…
Inflation is an early period of accelerated cosmic expansion, thought to be sourced by high energy physics. A key task today is to use the influx of increasingly precise observational data to constrain the plethora of inflationary models…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
A four-dimensional universe, arising from a flux compactification of Type IIB string theory, contains scalar fields with a potential determined by topological and geometric parameters of the internal -hidden- dimensions. We show that…
We show that a moduli space of the form predicted by string theory, lifted by supersymmetry breaking, gives rise to successful inflation for large regions of parameter space without any modification or fine tuning. This natural realization…
Motivated by brane cosmology we solve the Einstein equations with a time dependent cosmological constant. Assuming that at an early epoch the vacuum energy scales as $1/logt $, we show that the universe passes from a fast growing phase…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
Inflationary cosmology has become one of the cornerstones of modern cosmology. Inflation was the first theory within which it was possible to make predictions about the structure of the Universe on large scales, based on causal physics. The…
We present a holographic description of four-dimensional single-scalar inflationary universes in terms of a three-dimensional quantum field theory. The holographic description correctly reproduces standard inflationary predictions in their…
We investigate the circumstances under which cosmic inflation can arise from very inhomogeneous initial conditions using numerical relativity simulations. Previous studies have not considered cases with non-zero momentum density due to…
Inflation is the currently accepted paradigm for the beginnings of the Universe. To explain the observed almost scale invariant spectrum of density perturbations with only a slight spectral tilt, inflation must have been "slow roll", that…
The fundamental paradox of the incompatibility of the observed large-scale uniformity of the Universe with the fact that the age of the Universe is finite is overcome by the introduction of an initial a period of superluminal expansion of…
I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…
The cosmon field responsible for dynamical dark energy can induce an inflationary period in early cosmology. Details depend on dilatation symmetry breaking terms in its potential and kinetic term that are relevant only during early stages…
We propose a new framework for multi-field inflation in which a nearly constant potential energy is maintained during inflation before decreasing rapidly, in a manner analogous to a classical top spinning upright for a long time before…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
The spectrum of cosmological perturbations in the context of the one-bubble open inflation model is discussed, taking into account fluctuations of the metric. We find that, quite generically,thin wall single field models have no…