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We investigate what can be said about the interaction of scalar fields with Abelian gauge fields during a quasi-de Sitter phase of expansion and under the assumption that the electric and the magnetic susceptibilities do not coincide. The…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
We develop a numerical statistical method to study linear cosmological fluctuations in inflationary scenarios with multiple fields, and apply it to an ensemble of six-field inflection point models in string theory. The latter are concrete…
During inflation, spacetime is approximately described by de Sitter space which is conformally invariant with the symmetry group SO(1,4). This symmetry can significantly constrain the quantum perturbations which arise in the inflationary…
We study the effective field theory of inflation, i.e. the most general theory describing the fluctuations around a quasi de Sitter background, in the case of single field models. The scalar mode can be eaten by the metric by going to…
The inflaton field responsible for inflation may not be a canonical fundamental scalar. It is possible that the inflaton is a composite of fermions or it may have a decay width. In these cases the standard procedure for calculating the…
The observation of primordial correlators by cosmological surveys is a very promising avenue to probe high energies and the perturbative regime of quantum gravity. Hence, it is imperative that we understand how these observables are shaped…
We study inflationary models where the kinetic sector of the theory has a non-linearly realised symmetry which is broken by the inflationary potential. We distinguish between kinetic symmetries which non-linearly realise an internal or…
Our understanding of quantum field theory rests largely on explicit and controlled calculations in perturbation theory. Because of this, much recent effort has been devoted to improve our grasp of perturbative techniques on cosmological…
The physics during the inflationary stage of the universe is of quantum nature involving extremely high energy densities. Moreover, it is out of equilibrium on a fastly expanding dynamical geometry.We present in these lectures…
We investigate the validity of effective field theory methods and the decoupling of heavy fields during inflation. Considering models of inflation in which the inflaton is coupled to a heavy (super-Hubble) degree of freedom initially in its…
We present a novel theory of the very early universe which addresses the traditional horizon and flatness problems of big bang cosmology and predicts a scale invariant spectrum of perturbations. Unlike inflation, this scenario requires no…
We study a statistical model defined by a conformally invariant distribution of overlapping spheres in arbitrary dimension d. The model arises as the asymptotic distribution of cosmic bubbles in d+1 dimensional de Sitter space, and also as…
In this work, building up on [1] we present momentum space Ward identities related to broken higher spin symmetry as an alternate approach to computing correlators of spinning operators in interacting theories such as the quasi-fermionic…
The physics of de Sitter space is essential to our understanding of our cosmological past, present, and future. It forms the foundation for the statistical predictions of inflation in terms of quantum vacuum fluctuations that are being…
We consider the propagation of totally symmetric bosonic fields on generic background spacetimes. The mutual compatibility of the dynamical equations and constraints severely constrains the set of geometries where consistent propagation is…
We study leading order perturbative corrections to the two point correlation function of the scalar field describing the curvature perturbation in a slow-roll inflationary background, paying particular attention to the contribution of…
According to the dS/CFT correspondence, correlators of fields generated during a primordial de Sitter phase are constrained by three-dimensional conformal invariance. Using the properties of radially quantized conformal field theories and…
We discuss several aspects of quantum field theory of a scalar field in a Friedmann universe, clarifying and highlighting several conceptual and technical issues. (A) We show that one can map the dynamics of (1) a massless scalar field in a…
We show that a moduli space of the form predicted by string theory, lifted by supersymmetry breaking, gives rise to successful inflation for large regions of parameter space without any modification or fine tuning. This natural realization…