Related papers: Optimal Inflationary Potentials
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
The characteristics of the cosmic microwave background provide circumstantial evidence that the hot radiation-dominated epoch in the early universe was preceded by a period of inflationary expansion. Here, we show how a measurement of the…
We are on the verge of the first precision testing of the inflationary cosmology as a model for the origin of structure in the Universe. I review the key predictions of inflation which can be used as observational tests, in the sense of…
The production of a stochastic background of gravitational waves is a fundamental prediction of any cosmological inflationary model. The features of such a signal encode unique information about the physics of the Early Universe and beyond,…
Inflation in cosmology is a specific stage preceding the Big Bang, aimed at solving both old background problems and new perturbation issues. Single-field inflation is a candidate to illustrate the picture of the initial universe, and…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
We study the effective field theory of inflation, i.e. the most general theory describing the fluctuations around a quasi de Sitter background, in the case of single field models. The scalar mode can be eaten by the metric by going to…
We study small field models of inflation, which, against previous expectations, yield significant Gravitational Wave (GW) signal while reproducing other measured observable quantities in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). We numerically…
The inflationary paradigm is an important cornerstone of the concordance cosmological model. However, standard inflation cannot fully address the transition from an early homogeneous and isotropic stage, to another one lacking such…
The string $\alpha^\prime$-correction to the usual Einstein action comprises a Gauss-Bonnet integrand multiplied by non-trivial functions of the modulus field $\chi$ and/or the dilaton field $\phi$. We discuss how the presence of such terms…
We are in the era of precision cosmology which offers us a unique opportunity to investigate beyond standard model physics. Toward this endeavor, inflaton is assumed to be a perfect new physics candidate. In this submission, we explore the…
Using the latest observational data, we constrain the inflationary dynamics and the subsequent reheating epoch. Predictions for both phases can be significantly improved by employing numerically computed results compared to the slow-roll…
High-scale string inflationary models are in well-known tension with low-energy supersymmetry. A promising solution involves models where the inflaton is the volume of the extra dimensions so that the gravitino mass relaxes from large…
It is an interesting question whether low energy degrees of freedom may be responsible for early universe inflation. To examine this, here we present a simple version of Higgs-inflation with minimal coupling to gravity and a quadratic…
We present the first quantum field theory model of inflation that is renormalizable in the matter sector, with a super-Hubble inflaton mass and sub-Planckian field excursions, which is thus technically natural and consistent with a…
We describe the general inflationary dynamics that can arise with a single, canonically coupled field where the inflaton potential is a 4-th order polynomial. This scenario yields a wide range of combinations of the empirical spectral…
We revisit arguments that simple models of inflation with a small red tilt in the scalar power spectrum generically yield an observable tensor spectrum. We show that criteria for fine-tuning based upon the algebraic simplicity of the…
The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology, and - in conjuction with ideas from superstring theory - has led to speculations about an "inflationary multiverse". From a point of view of phenomenology, the…
The mechanism for triggering the universe inflation could be that at very early periods the time variable was discrete instead of smooth. Alternatively, and perhaps equivalently, it could be the consequence that the metrics of the early…