Related papers: Potential Surge Preheating: enhanced resonance fro…
We summarize the physical mechanism by which the Cosmic Microwave Background acquires a small degree of polarization. We discuss the imprint left by gravitational waves and the use of polarization as a test of the inflationary paradigm. We…
We study the robustness of single-field inflation against inhomogeneities. We derive a simple analytic criterion on the shape of the potential for successful inflation in the presence of inhomogeneities, and demonstrate its validity using…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
Inflation provides a unified paradigm for understanding the isotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the flatness problem, and the origin of large-scale structure. Although the physics responsible for inflation is not yet well…
We assess two potential signals of the formation of our universe by the decay of a false vacuum. Negative spatial curvature is one possibility, but the window for its detection is now small. However, another possible signal is a suppression…
The precision reached by the recent CMB measurements gives new insights into the shape of the primordial power spectra of the cosmological perturbations. In the context of inflationary cosmology, this implies that the CMB data are now…
We place functional constraints on the shape of the inflaton potential from the cosmic microwave background through a variant of the generalized slow roll approximation that allows large amplitude, rapidly changing deviations from…
Probing correlations among short and long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations is known to be decisive for deepening the current understanding of inflation at the microphysical level. Spectral distortions of the CMB can be caused by…
During the last ten years a detailed investigation of preheating was performed for chaotic inflation and for hybrid inflation. However, nonperturbative effects during reheating in the new inflation scenario remained practically unexplored.…
We conduct a model-independent analysis of temporal features during inflation in the large-scale CMB temperature power spectrum allowing for the possibility of non-negligible tensor contributions. Of 20 principal components of the…
We observe that when a local patch in a radiation filled Robertson-Walker universe inflates by some reason, outside perturbations can enter into the inflating region. Generally, the physical wavelengths of these perturbations become larger…
We investigate preheating of an inflaton field $\phi$ coupled nonminimally to a spacetime curvature. In the case of a self-coupling inflaton potential $V(\phi)=\lambda \phi^4/4$, the dynamics of preheating changes by the effect of the…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
A thermal gravitational wave background can be produced in the early Universe if a radiation dominated epoch precedes the usual inflationary stage. This background provides a unique way to study the initial state of the Universe. We discuss…
In this talk we elaborate on a mechanism to generate local contributions to the curvature perturbation in isolated patches of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The mechanism, based on the generation of an out-of-equilibrium…
We study the evolution of Gravitational Waves (GWs) during and after inflation as well as the resulting observational consequences in a Lorentz-violating massive gravity theory with one scalar (inflaton) and two tensor degrees of freedom.…
We consider a two-field model for inflation where the second order metric perturbations can be amplified by a parametric resonance during preheating. We demonstrate that there can arise a considerable enhancement of non-Gaussianity sourced…
A B-mode polarization signal in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is widely regarded as smoking gun evidence for gravitational waves produced during inflation. Here, we demonstrate that tensor perturbations sourced during…
In this work, we investigate the physical aspects of the inflection-point inflation scenario and assess its observational viability in light of current Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data. The model we consider encapsulates the inflaton…
The parametric resonance responsible for preheating after inflation will end when self-interactions of the resonating field and interactions of this field with secondary degrees of freedom become important. In many cases, the effect may be…