Related papers: Challenges to Inflation in the Post-Planck Era
A short inflationary phase may not erase all traces of the primordial universe. Associated observables include both spatial curvature and "anomalies" in the microwave background or large scale structure. The present curvature $\Omega_{K,0}$…
A particularly attractive feature of inflation is that quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field may have seeded inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the formation of large-scale structure. In this paper, we…
(Abridged) Does inflation have to happen all in one go? The answer is a resounding no! All cosmological problems can be solved by a sequence of short bursts of cosmic acceleration, interrupted by short epochs of decelerated expansion. The…
We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…
The advancement in the observational cosmology of the early universe such as Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations, puts severe constraints on the inflationary models. Many inflationary models have been ruled out by CMB,…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
We update constraints on the Hubble function H(phi) during inflation, using the most recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) and large scale structure (LSS) data. Our main focus is on a comparison between various commonly used methods of…
Inflation elegantly provides initial conditions for the standard model of cosmology, while solving the horizon, flatness, and magnetic monopole problems. Inflationary models make predictions for the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ and the…
We investigate the possibility that the amplitude of scalar density perturbations may be damped after inflation. This would imply that CMB anisotropies do not uniquely fix the amplitude of the perturbations generated during inflation and…
If the inflationary era is preceded by a radiation dominated era in which the inflaton too was in thermal equilibrium at some very early time then the CMB data places an upper bound on the comoving temperature of the (decoupled) inflaton…
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…
We report forecast constraints on warm inflation in the light of future cosmic microwave background (CMB) surveys, with data expected to be available in the coming decade. These observations could finally give us the missing information…
In the standard inflationary paradigm the inhomogeneities observed in the CMB arise from quantum fluctuations of an initially homogeneous and isotropic vacuum state. This picture suffers from two well-known weaknesses. First, it assumes…
Warm inflation has normalized two ideas in cosmology, that in the early universe the initial primordial density perturbations generally could be of classical rather than quantum origin and that during inflation, particle production from…
We show that in the case of positively-curved Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre universes $(k=+1)$, an inflationary period in the early universe will for most initial conditions not solve the horizon problem, no matter how long inflation lasts. It…
We explore a model of the early universe in which the inflationary epoch is preceded by a cosmic bounce, and argue that this scenario provides a common origin to several of the anomalous features that have been observed at large angular…
In this paper we present a simple argument that shows a non-singular bouncing cosmology naturally yields an era of super-inflation which can precede the phase of normal potential driven inflation. One of the consequences of a…
We perform a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis of a simple yet generic multifield inflation model characterized by two scalar fields coupled to each other and nonminimally coupled to gravity, fit to Planck 2018 cosmic microwave…
Within the $\alpha$-attractors framework we investigate scalar potentials with the same pole as the one featured in the kinetic term. We show that, in field space, this leads to directions without a plateau. Using this, we present a…
We present the implications for cosmic inflation of the Planck measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies in both temperature and polarization based on the full Planck survey. The Planck full mission temperature data…