Related papers: Cosmic Inflation at the Crossroads
In inflation cosmologies, cosmic structure develops through the gravitational instability of the inevitable quantum noise in primordial scalar fields. I show how the acceleration of the universe defines the shape of the primordial spectrum…
We present cosmological constraints from Planck 2015 data for a universe that is kinetically dominated at very early times. We perform a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis to estimate parameters and use nested sampling to determine the…
The weak gravity conjecture imposes severe constraints on natural inflation. A trans-Planckian axion decay constant can only be realized if the potential exhibits an additional (subdominant) modulation with sub-Planckian periodicity. The…
The dynamics of hybrid models is usually approximated by the evolution of a scalar field slowly rolling along a nearly flat valley. Inflation ends with a waterfall phase, due to a tachyonic instability. This final phase is usually assumed…
Cosmological inflation is the dominating paradigm to account for observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In this thesis, we study the phenomenology of a class of particularly well motivated models of inflation, known under…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
We find the best-fit cosmological parameters for a scenario of inflation with only the sufficient amount of accelerated expansion for the $\lambda\phi^4$ potential. While for the simplest scenario of chaotic inflation all observable…
The present epoch of accelerated cosmic expansion is supposed to be driven by an unknown constituent called dark energy, which in the standard model takes the form of a cosmological constant, characterized by a constant equation of state…
Until recently our knowledge of the primordial curvature perturbation was relatively modest. Ever since COBE delivered its map of data we know the scalar spectrum of primordial perturbations is approximately flat, with the power being only…
We investigate how inflation model selection is affected by the presence of additional free-streaming relativistic degrees of freedom, i.e. dark radiation. We perform a full Bayesian analysis of both inflation parameters and cosmological…
Slow roll reconstruction is derived from the Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of inflationary dynamics. It automatically includes information from sub-leading terms in slow roll, and facilitatesthe inclusion of priors based on the duration on…
We discuss the model selection problem for inflationary cosmology. We couple ModeCode, a publicly-available numerical solver for the primordial perturbation spectra, to the nested sampler MultiNest, in order to efficiently compute Bayesian…
We extend the WKB method for the computation of cosmological perturbations during inflation beyond leading order and provide the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations to second order in the slow-roll parameters. Our method does…
Cosmic inflation, which describes an accelerated expansion of the early Universe, yields the most successful predictions regarding temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Nevertheless, the precise origin of the…
We investigate a novel scenario of cosmological inflation in a gauged $B-L$ extended minimal supersymmetric Standard Model with R-symmetry. We use a noncanonical K\"{a}hler potential and a superpotential, both preserving the R-symmetry to…
Single-field models of $\alpha$-attractor quintessential inflation provide a unified picture of the two periods of early- and late-time cosmic acceleration, where both inflation and dark energy are described by a single scalar degree of…
Reheating is the the epoch which connects inflation to the subsequent hot Big-Bang phase. Conceptually very important, this era is however observationally poorly known. We show that the current Planck satellite measurements of the Cosmic…
An inflationary model can be constrained by non-gaussian statistics as a parameter in the LSS (Large Scale Structure) distribution, and in the radiation of CMB (Cosmic Microwave Background) fluctuating temperature. Data on the CMB from…
In light of the most recent cosmological observations, we provide new updated constraints on the slow-roll inflation in different extended scenarios beyond the $\Lambda\rm{CDM}$ cosmological model. Along with the usual six parameters, we…
The claimed detection of the BICEP2 experiment on the primordial B-mode of cosmic microwave background polarization suggests that cosmic inflation possibly takes place at the energy around the grand unified theory scale given a constraint…