Related papers: Starobinsky potential and power suppression in hyb…
Sudden phase transitions during inflation can give rise to strongly enhanced primordial density perturbations on scales much smaller than those directly probed by cosmic microwave background anisotropies. In this paper, we study the effect…
In loop quantum cosmology, the universe avoids a big bang singularity and undergoes an early and short super-inflation phase. During super-inflation, non-perturbative quantum corrections to the dynamics drive an inflaton field up its…
In this work, we studied the slow-roll approximation of cosmic inflation within the context of $f(R,T)$ gravity, where $R$ is the scalar curvature, and $T$ is the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. By choosing a minimal coupling between…
We revisit the status of hybrid inflation in the light of Planck and recent BICEP2 results, taking care of possible transient violations of the slow-roll conditions as the field passes from the large field to the vacuum dominated phase. The…
We compute the evolution of the entanglement entropy for a massless field within a spherical region throughout the inflationary period and the subsequent era of radiation domination, starting from the Bunch-Davies vacuum. In order to focus…
The simplest models of inflation based on slow roll produce nearly scale invariant primordial power spectra (PPS). But there are also numerous models that predict radically broken scale invariant PPS. In particular, markedly cuspy dips in…
Loop quantum cosmology (LQC) provides promising resolutions to the trans-Planckian issue and initial singularity arising in the inflationary models of general relativity. In general, due to different quantization approaches, LQC involves…
We compute the power spectrum of curvature perturbations in stochastic inflation. This combines the distribution of first crossing times through the end-of-inflation surface, which has been previously studied, with the distribution of the…
In the context of inflation, non-vacuum initial states for cosmological perturbations that possess a built in scale are studied. It is demonstrated that this assumption leads to a falsifiable class of models. The question of whether they…
We study a contracting universe composed of cold dark matter and radiation, and with a positive cosmological constant. As is well known from standard cosmological perturbation theory, under the assumption of initial quantum vacuum…
We explore the consequences of the existence of a very large number of light scalar degrees of freedom in the early universe. We distinguish between participator and spectator fields. The former have a small mass, and can contribute to the…
Inflation, a period of exponential expansion in the early Universe, is considered an important part of the standard $\Lambda$CDM cosmological model, and plays a crucial role in explaining a wide range of current observations. The standard…
The big bang singularity could be understood as a breakdown of Einstein's General Relativity at very high energies. Adopting this viewpoint, other theories, that implement Einstein Cosmology at high energies, might solve the problem of the…
In this work we investigate observational signatures of a primordial power spectrum with exponential infrared suppression, motivated by the choice of a non-oscillatory vacuum in a bouncing and inflationary geometry within Loop Quantum…
We construct and study a simple noncommutative scheme (theta-deformation) for the effective Loop Quantum Cosmology of the flat Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker model in the presence of a homogeneous scalar field $\phi$ with a potential…
We consider that the pre-inflation era is radiation-dominated, transiting smoothly to the inflationary era. We work out in detail the dynamics of inflaton fluctuations across the phase transition and the proper choices of initial vacuum…
We present cosmological constraints from Planck 2015 data for a universe that is kinetically dominated at very early times. We perform a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis to estimate parameters and use nested sampling to determine the…
In loop quantum cosmology (LQC), the initial singularity is replaced by a quantum bounce, leading to a universal post-bounce evolution characterized by three distinct epochs: bouncing, transition, and slow-roll inflation, before the hot…
The Starobinsky model of cosmological inflation in four spacetime dimensions is reviewed with the emphasis on impact of quantum gravity corrections. As a specific example of the quantum corrections, the Grisaru-Zanon quartic curvature terms…
We identify the effective theory describing inflationary super-Hubble scales and show it to be a special case of effective field theories appropriate to open systems. Open systems allow information to be exchanged between the degrees of…