Related papers: Massive-ish Particles from Small-ish Scales: Non-P…
We study the possibility that particle production during inflation can source the required power spectrum for dark matter (DM) primordial black holes (PBH) formation. We consider the scalar and the gauge quanta production in inflation…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
The primordial four-point function encodes a wealth of information about the inflationary Universe. Despite extensive theoretical work, most models of four-point physics have never been compared to data. In this series, we conduct a…
Many models of inflation predict oscillatory features in the bispectrum of primordial fluctuations. Since it has been shown that primordial non-Gaussianity can lead to a scale-dependent halo bias, we investigate the effect of oscillations…
We propose a qualitatively new mechanism for generating cosmological fluctuations from inflation. The non-equilibrium excitation of interacting scalar fields often evolves into infra-red (IR) and ultra-violet (UV) cascading, resulting in an…
Cosmological correlation functions contain valuable information about the primordial Universe, with possible signatures of new massive particles at very high energies. Recent developments, including the cosmological bootstrap, bring new…
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…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
Cosmological inflation generates a spectrum of density perturbations that can seed the cosmic structures we observe today. These perturbations are usually computed as the result of the gravitationally-induced spontaneous creation of…
After introducing gauge-invariant cosmological perturbation theory we give an improved set of governing equations for multiple fluids including energy transfer. Having defined adiabatic and entropic perturbations we derive the…
A plethora of inflationary models can produce interesting small-scale phenomenology, such as enhanced scalar fluctuations leading to primordial black hole (PBH) production and large scalar-induced GW. Nevertheless, good models must…
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…
We describe a simple and efficient mechanism by which very heavy particles are copiously created from a primordial inflationary epoch. It works for scalar fields which are massless or very light during inflation and acquire a large mass…
We study the possibility that particle production during inflation could source observable gravity waves on scales relevant for Cosmic Microwave Background experiments. A crucial constraint on such scenarios arises because particle…
In this paper, we present the first comprehensive CMB data analysis of cosmological collider physics. New heavy particles during inflation can leave imprints in the primordial correlators which are observable in today's cosmological…
We investigate small-scale signatures of the inflationary particle content. We consider the case of a light spin-2 particle sourcing primordial gravitational waves by employing an effective field theory description. Upon allowing…
The impact of particle production during inflation on the primordial curvature perturbation spectrum is investigated both analytically and numerically. We obtain an oscillatory behavior on small scales, while on large scales the spectrum is…
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
We investigate the non-perturbative production of scalar particles within the Higgs-$R^2$ inflation model, focusing on a massive spectator field that interacts gravitationally via a non-minimal coupling to the Ricci scalar $R$. By…
[Abridged] A sharp cut-off in the primordial scalar power spectrum on large scales has been known to improve the fit to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data when compared to the more standard, nearly scale invariant power spectrum…