Related papers: Mimicking two field inflationary features with a s…
We employ the formalism of the effective field theory of inflation to study the effects of a sudden change in the speed of sound of the inflationary perturbations. Such an event generates a feature with high frequency oscillations both in…
The generic prediction for the perturbations generated during slow--roll, single--field inflation, as they appear in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), is a flat, close--to--Gaussian spectrum. We calculate the general solution for a…
In single-field inflation, violation of the slow-roll approximation can lead to growth of curvature perturbation outside the horizon. This violation is characterized by a period with a large negative value of the second slow-roll parameter.…
It is showed by a conformal rescaling that the inflationary background can be dual to a slowly expanding background, which is almost Minkowski and described by a conformal field theory conformally coupled to gravity. It is proved that the…
We analyse slow-roll inflationary cosmologies that are holographically dual to a three-dimensional conformal field theory deformed by a nearly marginal scalar operator. We show the cosmological power spectrum is inversely proportional to…
Galileon fields arise naturally from the decoupling limit of massive gravities, and possess special self-interactions which are protected by a spacetime generalization of Galilean symmetry. We briefly revisit the inflationary phenomenology…
The recently released BICEP2 data detected the primordial B-mode polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) map which strongly supports for a large tensor-to-scalar ratio, and thus, is found to be in tension with the Planck…
We explore the correlations between correlation functions of the primordial curvature perturbation produced during inflation. We find that for general single field inflation, other than the source terms which depend on the model details,…
Stochastic effects in multi-field inflationary scenarios are investigated. A hierarchy of diffusion equations is derived, the solutions of which yield moments of the numbers of inflationary $e$-folds. Solving the resulting partial…
We have developed a precise dictionary between the spectrum of primordial density fluctuations and the parameters of the effective field theory (EFT) of inflation that determine the primordial power spectrum (PPS). At lowest order the EFT…
In models like axion monodromy, temporal features during inflation which are not associated with its ending can produce scalar, and to a lesser extent, tensor power spectra where deviations from scale-free power law spectra can be as large…
We study models of inflation where the inflaton corresponds to a flat direction in field space and its mass term is generated by gravity mediated soft supersymmetry breaking at high scale. Assuming the inflaton to have non negligible…
We discuss the phenomenology of recently proposed holographic models of inflation, in which the very early universe is non-geometric and is described by a dual three-dimensional quantum field theory (QFT). We analyze models determined by a…
We explore the effects of heavy degrees of freedom on the evolution and perturbations of light modes in multifield inflation. We use a simple two-field model as an example to illustrate the subtleties of integrating out massive fields in a…
Motivated by the idea that inflation occurs at the GUT symmetry breaking scale, in this paper we construct a new class of large field inflaton potentials where the inflaton starts with a power law potential; after initial period of relative…
Supersymmetric hybrid inflation is an exquisite framework to connect inflationary cosmology to particle physics at the scale of grand unification. Ending in a phase transition associated with spontaneous symmetry breaking, it can naturally…
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 develop methods to calculate the curvature power spectrum in models where features in the inflaton potential nonlinearly excite modes and generate high frequency features in the spectrum. The first nontrivial effect of excitations…
In non-canonical two-field inflation models, deviations from the canonical model can be captured by a parameter $\xi$. We show this parameter is usually one half of the slow-roll order and analytically calculate the primordial power spectra…
Features in the inflationary landscape can inject extra energies to inflation models and produce on-shell particles with masses much larger than the Hubble scale of inflation. This possibility extends the energy reach of the program of…