Related papers: Confronting Inflation and Reheating with Observati…
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe can be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In this…
It is commonly believed that our Universe has experienced two different stages of accelerated expansion. The early stage is known as inflation and the current acceleration is driven by dark energy. Observing inflation and dark energy…
In this work, we analyze two possible alternative and model-independent approaches to describe the inflationary period. The first one assumes a general equation of state during inflation due to Mukhanov, while the second one is based on the…
The reheating phase after inflation is one of the least observationally constrained epochs in the evolution of the Universe. The forthcoming gravitational wave observatories will enable us to constrain at least some of the non-standard…
This article gives a brief overview of the status of attempts to constrain inflation using observations, and examines prospects for future developments.
We present and discuss a new approach increasing by orders of magnitude the speed of performing Bayesian inference and parameter estimation within the framework of slow-roll inflation. The method relies on the determination of an effective…
This article contains a concise review of the theory of inflation. We discuss its main theoretical aspects as well as its observational predictions. We also explain how the most recent astrophysical observations constrain the inflationary…
A new family of inflationary models is introduced and analysed. The behaviour of the parameters characterising the models suggest preferred values, which generate the most interesting testable predictions. Results are further improved if…
The theory of reheating of the Universe after inflation is developed. The transition from inflation to the hot Universe turns out to be strongly model-dependent and typically consists of several stages. Immediately after inflation the field…
Slow roll reconstruction is derived from the Hamilton-Jacobi formulation of inflationary dynamics. It automatically includes information from sub-leading terms in slow roll, and facilitatesthe inclusion of priors based on the duration on…
We calculate power spectra of cosmological perturbations at high accuracy for two classes of inflation models. We classify the models according to the behaviour of the Hubble distance during inflation. Our approximation works if the Hubble…
The observational signatures of multi-field inflation will generally evolve as the Universe reheats. We introduce a general analytic formalism for tracking this evolution through perturbative reheating, applicable to two field models with…
The temperature at the end of reheating and the length of this cosmological phase can be bound to the inflationary observables if one considers the cosmological evolution from the time of Hubble crossing until today. There are many examples…
Potential slow-roll parameters are widely used in inflationary cosmology to estimate the scalar and tensor perturbation amplitudes and the scalar spectral index, although the inflationary observables are fundamentally expressed in terms of…
For the subclass of Horndeski theory of gravity, we investigate the effects of reheating on the predictions of natural inflation. In the presence of derivative self-interaction of a scalar field and its kinetic coupling to the Einstein…
The spectrum of inflationary tensor perturbations is one of the very few available probes of the post-inflationary reheating epoch, and it is strongly influenced by the Universe's equation of state during this period. In the current era of…
In previous work we argued that the correct procedure to predict the gravitational wave signal from preheating after inflation rests on the in-in formalism. We extend here our previous analysis to include the backreaction of the produced…
We extend the WKB method for the computation of cosmological perturbations during inflation beyond leading order and provide the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations to second order in the slow-roll parameters. Our method does…
In this lecture I will review some recent progress in improving the accuracy of the calculation of density perturbations resulting from inflation.
One of the fundamental problems of modern cosmology is to explain the origin of all the matter and radiation in the Universe today. The inflationary model predicts that the oscillations of the scalar field at the end of inflation will…