Related papers: Eff-ACT-ive Starobinsky pre-inflation
(Shortened abstract) While a featureless, nearly scale invariant, primordial scalar power spectrum fits the most recent CMB data rather well, certain features in the spectrum are known to lead to a better fit to the data (although, the…
There is an apparent power deficit relative to the Lambda-CDM prediction of the CMB spectrum at large scales, which, though not yet statistically significant, persists from WMAP to Planck data. We first present a simple toy model…
The latest CMB data from ACT DR6, combined with Planck, DESI, and BICEP/Keck, indicate a slight upward shift in the scalar spectral index, placing several previously favored inflationary models under tension. We study an inflationary…
We study the inflationary era of the Universe in a modified cosmological scenario based on the gravity-thermodynamics conjecture with Barrow entropy instead of the usual Bekenstein-Hawking one. The former arises from the effort to account…
The 2015 Planck data release has placed tight constraints on the allowed class of inflationary models. The current data favors concave downwards inflationary potentials while offering interesting hints on possible deviations from the…
In the context of inflationary models with a pre-inflationary stage, in which the Einstein equations are obeyed, the weak energy condition is satisfied, and spacetime topology is trivial, we argue that homogeneity on super-Hubble scales…
Inflationary cosmology proposes that the early Universe undergoes accelerated expansion, driven, in simple scenarios, by a single scalar field, or inflaton. The form of the inflaton potential determines the initial spectra of density…
In the framework of inflation, scales which nowadays correspond to large scale structures were smaller than the Planck length at the beginning of inflation. Therefore, measurements of CMBR anisotropy or surveys of galaxies and of clusters…
We present a rigorous and comprehensive investigation of a generalized inflationary perturbation theory designed to address persistent large-scale anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Motivated by the Trans-Planckian problem…
We single out the Starobinsky model and its extensions among generic $f(R)$ gravity as attractors at large field values for chaotic inflation. Treating a $R^3$ curvature term as a perturbation of the Starobinsky model, we impose the…
Cosmological models with inflation and those with bounce have their own strengths and weaknesses. Here we construct a model in which a phase of bounce is followed by a viable inflationary phase. This incorporates several advantages of both…
The Starobinsky model is a natural inflationary scenario in which inflation arises due to quantum effects of the massless matter fields. A modified version of the Starobinsky (MSt) model takes the masses of matter fields and the…
Motivated by the recent observation of the B-mode signal in the cosmic microwave background by BICEP2, we stuty the Starobinsky-type inflation model in the framework of old-minimal supergravity, where the inflaton field in the original…
Higher-order theories of gravity are extensions to general relativity (GR) motivated mainly by high-energy physics searching for GR ultraviolet completeness. They are characterized by the inclusion of correction terms in the…
The recent detection by the BICEP2 collaboration of a high level of tensor modes seems to exclude the Starobinsky model of inflation. In this paper we show that this conclusion can be avoided: one can embed the Starobinsky model in…
We discuss how the higher-derivative Starobinsky model of inflation originates from N=1 supergravity. It is known that, in the old-minimal supergravity description written by employing a chiral compensator in the superconformal framework,…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
The aim of this paper is to provide a more precise description of the paradigm of corpuscular slow-roll inflation, which was previously introduced by Casadio et al. in [1]. Specifically, we start by expanding the Starobinsky theory on a…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
We generalise Starobinsky's model of inflation to space-times with $D>4$ dimensions, where $D-4$ dimensions are compactified on a suitable manifold. The $D$-dimensional action features Einstein-Hilbert gravity, a higher-order curvature…