Related papers: Independent connection in ACTion during inflation
The increasingly stringent observational bounds on primordial gravitational waves strongly constrain inflationary model building, favoring scenarios that predict highly suppressed tensor perturbations. While many viable constructions rely…
Inflection point inflation generically includes a deviation from slow-roll when the inflaton approaches the inflection point. Such deviations are shown to be generated by transitions between singular trajectories. The effects on the power…
Inflation is studied in the context of induced gravity (IG) $\gamma \sigma^2 R$, where $R$ is the Ricci scalar, $\sigma$ a scalar field and $\gamma$ a dimensionless constant. We study in detail cosmological perturbations in IG and examine…
We revisit the framework of axion-like inflation in view of the possibility that the coupling of the inflaton to a non-Abelian topological charge density could lead to the generation of a rapidly thermalizing heat bath. Both dispersive…
An extension of the Standard Model with three right-handed neutrinos and a simple invisible axion model can account for all experimentally confirmed signals of new physics (neutrino oscillations, dark matter and baryon asymmetry) in…
It is an interesting question whether low energy degrees of freedom may be responsible for early universe inflation. To examine this, here we present a simple version of Higgs-inflation with minimal coupling to gravity and a quadratic…
The presence of a light vector field coupled to a scalar field during inflation makes a distinct prediction: the observed correlation functions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) become statistically anisotropic. We study the…
We consider a model of inflation in which the inflaton field is a rolling axion with a potential which is flat enough to support an intermediate phase of USR inflation. Because of the Chern-Simons interaction, one polarization of the gauge…
We investigate a class of slow roll inflationary models in the light of the recent Cosmic Microwave Background constraints from Planck 2018, ACT DR6, DESI DR1, and BICEP/\textit{Keck} 2018. The combined dataset favors a higher value of the…
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) has recently reported updated measurements of the scalar spectral index $n_s$, revealing a tension with the predictions of many conventional inflationary models. In this work, we adopt a…
During inflation, higher derivative terms in the gravitational action may play a significant role. Building on new stable formulations of four-derivative scalar-tensor theories, we study the impact of these corrections in the case where the…
A direct detection of primordial gravitational waves is the ultimate probe for any inflation model. While current CMB bounds predict the generic scale-invariant gravitational wave spectrum from slow-roll inflation to be below the reach of…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…
We explore a model of inflation where the inflaton mass-squared is generated at a high scale by gravity-mediated soft supersymmetry breaking, and runs at lower scales to the small value required for slow-roll inflation. The running is…
We investigate the observational constraints on $\alpha$-attractor inflationary models and their post-inflationary reheating dynamics in light of the latest CMB data from ACT DR6 combined with Planck18, BICEP/$Keck$ 2018, and DESI…
Affine gravity, a gravity theory based on affine connection with no notion of metric, supports scalar field dynamics only if scalar fields have non-vanishing potential. The non-vanishing vacuum energy ensures that the cosmological constant…
We consider models of chaotic inflation driven by the real parts of a conjugate pair of Higgs superfields involved in the spontaneous breaking of a grand unification symmetry at a scale assuming its value within MSSM. We combine a…
On compactification from higher dimensions, a single free massive scalar field gives rise to a set of effective four-dimensional scalar fields, each with a different mass. These can cooperate to drive a period of inflation known as assisted…
Inflationary models predict a definite, model independent, angular dependence for the three-point correlation function of $\Delta T/T$ at large angles (greater than $\sim 1^\circ$) which we calculate. The overall amplitude is model…
Soft limits of $N$-point correlation functions, in which one wavenumber is much smaller than the others, play a special role in constraining the physics of inflation. Anisotropic sources such as a vector field during inflation generate…