Related papers: Causality Bounds on the Primordial Power Spectrum
The leading account of several salient observable features of our universe today is provided by the theory of cosmic inflation. But an important and thus far intractable question is whether inflation is generic, or whether it is finely…
We compute the power spectrum of curvature perturbations in stochastic inflation. This combines the distribution of first crossing times through the end-of-inflation surface, which has been previously studied, with the distribution of the…
In this paper, we study the effective field theory (EFT) of dark energy for the $k$-essence model beyond linear order. Using particle-mesh $N$-body simulations that consistently solve the dark energy evolution on a grid, we find that the…
We revisit inflation coupled with vector fields employing kinetic coupling in the comoving gauge. It is known that there is a cumulative effect $IN^2$ on the curvature power spectrum. For a large number of e-foldings $N$, this contribution…
We investigate linear cosmological perturbations in multiple field inflationary models where some of the directions are light while others are heavy (with respect to the Hubble parameter). By integrating out the massive degrees of freedom,…
Based on the Effective Field Theory (EFT) of cosmological perturbations, we explicitly clarify the pathology in nonsingular cubic Galileon models and show how to cure it in EFT with new insights into this issue. With the least set of EFT…
The generation of large curvature perturbations associated with the production of primordial black holes is studied in the context of a Higgs inflaton. To enable this amplification, we consider an inflationary model in which the tree-level…
While the simplest inflationary models predict a power-law form of the primordial power spectrum (PPS), various UV complete scenarios predict features on top of the standard power law that leave characteristic imprints in the late-time…
The hemispherical power asymmetry in the cosmic microwave background may be explained by the modulation of some primordial cosmological parameter, such as the sound speed of the inflaton. This modulation can be achieved by the perturbation…
Effective Field Theory (EFT) is an efficient method for parametrizing unknown high energy physics effects on low energy data. When applied to time-dependent backgrounds, EFT must be supplemented with initial conditions. In these…
The first year of observations by the Planck satellite mission shows that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations are consistent with gaussian statistics in the primordial perturbations, a key prediction of the simplest models of…
We derive new effective field theory (EFT) positivity bounds on the elastic $2\to2$ scattering amplitudes of massive spinning particles from the standard UV properties of unitarity, causality, locality and Lorentz invariance. By bounding…
We present the effective field theory studies of primordial statistical anisotropies in models of anisotropic inflation. The general action in unitary gauge is presented to calculate the leading interactions between the gauge field…
We take an Effective Field Theory (EFT) approach to unifying existing proposals for the origin of cosmic acceleration and its connection to cosmological observations. Building on earlier work where EFT methods were used with observations to…
As a simple model for unknown Planck scale physics, we assume that the quantum modes responsible for producing primordial curvature perturbations during inflation are placed in their instantaneous adiabatic vacuum when their proper momentum…
We analyse the efficiency of future large scale structure surveys to unveil the presence of scale dependent features in the primordial spectrum --resulting from cosmic inflation-- imprinted in the distribution of galaxies. Features may…
We explore the effect of initial conditions on the inflationary wavefunction and their consequences for the observed spectrum of primordial fluctuations. In a class of models with a sudden transition into inflation we find that, for a…
The effective actions describing the low-energy dynamics of QFTs involving gravity generically exhibit causality violations. These may take the form of superluminal propagation or Shapiro time advances and allow the construction of "time…
The requirements of unitarity and causality lead to significant constraints on the Wilson coefficients of an EFT expansion, known as positivity bounds. Their standard derivation relies on the crucial assumption of polynomial boundedness on…
Many early universe scenarios predict post-inflationary tensor perturbations from causality-limited, sub-horizon sources. While the microphysical details may differ, as long as these sources are bounded in duration and correlation length,…