Related papers: Causality Bounds on the Primordial Power Spectrum
Inflationary scenarios motivated by high-energy physics generically contain a plethora of degrees of freedom beyond the primordial curvature perturbation. The latter interacts in a simple way with what we name "inflationary flavor…
The motion of a pseudo-scalar field $X$ during inflation naturally induces a significant amplification of the gauge fields to which it is coupled. The amplified gauge fields can source characteristic scalar and tensor primordial…
For a single scalar field with unit sound speed minimally coupled to Einstein gravity, there are exactly three distinct cosmological solutions which produce a scale invariant spectrum of curvature perturbations in a dynamical attractor…
Local superluminal photon propagation arises at $\mathcal{O}(\alpha/m_e^2)$ in the Drummond Hathrell (DH) effective action obtained by integrating out the electron in QED coupled to gravity. Whether such superluminality implies a genuine…
The post-inflationary evolution of inflation-produced magnetic fields, conventional or not, can change dramatically when two fundamental issues are accounted for. The first is causality, which demands that local physical processes can never…
We investigate the primordial power spectrum of the density perturbations based on the assumption that spacetime is noncommutative in the early stage of inflation. Due to the spacetime noncommutativity, the primordial power spectrum can…
We study the primordial tensor perturbation produced from the double inflationary scenario with an intermediate break stage. Because of the transitions, the power spectrum deviates from the vacuum one and there will appear oscillatory…
Gravitational waves (GWs) induced by primordial fluctuations can be affected by the modification of the sound speed $c^2_{\rm s}$ and the equation of state parameter $w$ once the curvature fluctuations reenter the cosmological horizon. That…
We compute the corrections to the primordial power spectrum that should arise in realistic inflationary scenarios if there exists a generic covariant ultraviolet (UV) cutoff, as commonly motivated by considerations of quantum gravity. The…
Scalar perturbations during inflation can be substantially amplified by tiny features in the inflaton potential. A bump-like feature behaves like a local speed-breaker and lowers the speed of the scalar field, thereby locally enhancing the…
We develop a systematic framework to compute the primordial power spectrum up to next-to-next-to-next to leading order (N3LO) in the Hubble-flow parameters for a large class of effective theories of inflation. We assume that the quadratic…
The low frequency part of the gravitational wave spectrum generated by local physics, such as a phase transition or parametric resonance, is largely fixed by causality, offering a clean window into the early Universe. In this work, this low…
Positivity bounds represent nontrivial limitations on effective field theories (EFTs) if those EFTs are to be completed into a Lorentz-invariant, causal, local, and unitary framework. While such positivity bounds have been applied in a wide…
In the context of canonical quantum gravity, we consider the effects of a non-standard expression for the gravitational wave function on the evolution of inflationary perturbations. Such an expression and its effects may be generated by a…
We present a general framework where the effective field theory of single field inflation is extended by the inclusion of operators with mass dimension 3 and 4 in the unitary gauge. These higher dimensional operators introduce quartic and…
A massive scalar field in a curved spacetime can propagate along the light cone, a causal pathology, which can, in principle, be eliminated only if the scalar couples conformally to the Ricci curvature of spacetime. This property mandates…
We discuss features of the inflaton potential that can lead to a strong enhancement of the power spectrum of curvature perturbations. We show that a steep decrease of the potential induces an enhancement of the spectrum by several orders of…
The inflationary and pre-inflationary evolution of scalar modes of cosmological perturbations in a closed universe is analyzed for a loop quantum cosmology model with an inflationary regime consistent with the constraints on inflation…
The pattern of acoustic peaks in the sub-horizon power spectrum of primordial density anisotropies at recombination can be naturally understood in the framework of standard Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology (without inflation) as a…
The enhancement of the spectrum of primordial comoving curvature perturbation $\R$ can induce the production of primordial black holes (PBH) which could account for part of present day dark matter. As an example of the effects of the…