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Heavy particles with masses much bigger than the inflationary Hubble scale $H_*$, can get non-adiabatically pair produced during inflation through their couplings to the inflaton. If such couplings give rise to time-dependent masses for the…
Massive fields during inflation provide an interesting opportunity to test new physics at very high energy scales. Meanwhile in fundamental realizations, the inflationary field space typically has a curved geometry, which may leave…
We use a numerical code to compute the density perturbations generated during an inflationary epoch which includes a spontaneous symmetry breaking phase transition. A sharp step in the inflaton potential generates $k$ dependent oscillations…
Heavy fields coupled to the inflaton reduce the speed of sound in the effective theory of the adiabatic mode each time the background inflationary trajectory deviates from a geodesic. This can result in features in the primordial spectra.…
Inflationary models predict a correlation between primordial density perturbations (scalar metric perturbations) and gravitational waves (tensor metric perturbations) in the form of a scalar-scalar-tensor three-point correlation, or…
Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…
The representation theory of de Sitter space allows for a category of partially massless particles which have no flat space analog, but could have existed during inflation. We study the couplings of these exotic particles to inflationary…
We study a multi-field inflationary theory with separable Lagrangian, which has different speed of sound for each field. We find that the fields always coupled at perturbative level through gravitational interaction. We show that if the…
The curvaton and the inhomogeneous reheating scenarios for the generation of the cosmological curvature perturbation on large scales represent an alternative to the standard slow-roll scenario where the observed density perturbations are…
We extend the standard theory of cosmological perturbations to homogeneous but anisotropic universes. We present an exhaustive computation for the case of a Bianchi I model, with a residual isotropy between two spatial dimensions, which is…
We study the evolution of various measures of quantumness of the curvature perturbation by integrating out the inaccessible entropic fluctuations in the multi-field models of inflation. In particular, we discuss the following measures of…
Cosmic inflation, which describes an accelerated expansion of the early Universe, yields the most successful predictions regarding temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Nevertheless, the precise origin of the…
Inflation is an early period of accelerated cosmic expansion, thought to be sourced by high energy physics. A key task today is to use the influx of increasingly precise observational data to constrain the plethora of inflationary models…
We investigate the generation of features at large scales in the primordial power spectrum (PPS) when inflation is driven by two scalar fields. In canonical single field models of inflation, these features are often generated due to…
Cosmological colliders can preserve information from interactions at very high energy scale, and imprint them on cosmological observables. Taking the squeezed limit of cosmological perturbation bispectrum, information of the intermediate…
We perform a combined perturbation and observational investigation of the scenario of non-minimal derivative coupling between a scalar field and curvature. First we extract the necessary condition that ensures the absence of instabilities,…
Observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe suggest the possibility of oscillations in the primordial density perturbation. Such deviations from the usually assumed scale-free…
In inflation cosmologies, cosmic structure develops through the gravitational instability of the inevitable quantum noise in primordial scalar fields. I show how the acceleration of the universe defines the shape of the primordial spectrum…
We revisit the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) constraints on the spatial curvature of the Universe, assessing how they change when the curvature parameter and the primordial inflationary scalar spectrum are treated consistently within…
In this thesis, we discuss several instances in which non-linear behaviour affects cosmological evolution in the early Universe. We begin by reviewing the standard cosmological model and the tools used to understand it theoretically and to…