Related papers: Echoes from a long time ago: Chewbacca inflation
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
We revisit the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints on the spatial curvature of the Universe, assessing how they change when the curvature parameter and the primordial inflationary scalar spectrum are treated consistently within…
Inflation is now an accepted paradigm in standard cosmology, with its predictions consistent with observations of the cosmic microwave background. It lacks, however, a firm physical theory, with many possible theoretical origins beyond the…
We summarize three recent efforts to constrain the first few moments of cosmic creation before and during the epoch of inflation. We consider two means to explain a slight dip in the power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background for…
We propose a $\Lambda$-inflation model which explains a large fraction of the COBE signal by cosmic gravitational waves. The primordial density perturbations fulfil both the contraints of large-scale microwave background and galaxy cluster…
The apparent alignment of the cosmic microwave background multipoles on large scales challenges the standard cosmological model. Scalar field inflation is isotropic and cannot account for the observed alignment. We explore the imprints, a…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to…
We study how the next generation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurement missions (such as EPIC, LiteBIRD, PRISM and COrE) will be able to constrain the inflationary landscape in the hardest to disambiguate situation in which…
The delensing of cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps will be increasingly valuable for extracting as much information as possible from future CMB surveys. Delensing provides many general benefits, including sharpening of the acoustic…
A period of inflation in the early universe produces a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves over a huge range in wavelength. If the amplitude of this gravitational wave background is large enough to be detectable with…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
The temperature perturbations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) appear systematically suppressed, at large angular scales, with respect to the prediction of the LambdaCDM concordance model. This behavior might be a glimpse…
Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density…
In addition to density perturbations, inflationary models of the early universe generally predict a stochastic background of gravitational waves or tensor fluctuations. By making use of the inflationary flow approach for single field models…
We investigate the effects of non-zero spatial curvature on cosmic inflation in the light of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from the Planck 2018 legacy release and from the 2015 observing season of BICEP2 and the…
The next generation of instruments designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will provide a historic opportunity to open the gravitational wave window to the primordial Universe. Through high sensitivity…
We investigate the observational signatures of three models of the early Universe in the $B$-mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. In addition to the standard single field inflationary model, we also consider…
In this paper, we investigate some consequences of multiple-field inflation for the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). We derive expressions for the amplitudes, the spectral indices and the derivatives of the indices of the CMB…
We review the constraints that the recently released Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Planck data put on inflation and we argue that single field slow-roll inflationary scenarios (with minimal kinetic term) are favored. Then, within this…
The enormous red-shifting of the modes during the inflationary epoch suggests that physics at the very high energy scales may modify the primordial perturbation spectrum. Therefore, the measurements of the anisotropies in the Cosmic…