Related papers: Constraining the inflaton potential with gravitati…
I review two mechanisms by which gravitational waves can be generated at the end of inflation: preheating, and gravitons Hawking radiated during the decay of very small primordial black holes. These mechanisms are contrasted with the…
In contrast to the inflaton's case, the curvature perturbations due to the curvaton field depend strongly on the evolution of the curvaton before its decay. We study in detail the dynamics of the curvaton evolution during and after…
A generic consequence of supersymmetry is formation of a scalar condensate along the flat directions of the potential at the end of cosmological inflation. This condensate is usually unstable, and it can fragment into non-topological…
A special class of conformal gravity theories is proposed to solve the long standing problem of the fine-tuned cosmological constant. In the proposed model time evolution of the inflaton field leaves behind a nearly vanishing, but finite…
We investigate the gravitational wave background induced by the first order scalar perturbations in the curvaton models. We consider the quadratic and axion-like curvaton potential which can generate the blue-tilted power spectrum of…
Ultra-light primordial black holes, with masses $m_\mathrm{PBH}<10^9\mathrm{g}$, evaporate before big-bang nucleosynthesis and can therefore not be directly constrained. They can however be so abundant that they dominate the universe…
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
We propose a new mechanism to generate primordial curvature perturbations, based on the resonant production of particles during inflation. It is known that this phenomenon can trap the inflaton for a fraction of e-fold. This effect is…
We study the formation of primordial black holes and the generation of gravitational waves in a class of cosmological models that are direct supersymmetric analogs of the observationally favored nonminimally coupled Higgs inflation model.…
A generic feature of string compactifications is the presence of many scalar fields, called moduli. Moduli are usually displaced from their post-inflationary minimum during inflation. Their relaxation to the minimum could lead to the…
We revisit the study of the phenomenology associated to a burst of particle production of a field whose mass is controlled by the inflaton field and vanishes at one given instance during inflation. This generates a bump in the correlators…
If an early matter phase of the Universe existed after inflation with the proper power spectrum, enhanced density perturbations can decouple from the Hubble flow, turn around and collapse. In contrast to what happens in a radiation…
We estimate the abundance of the coherent oscillation of moduli, which linearly couple to matter fields through higher dimensional operators. During the (p)reheating after inflation, matter particles are efficiently produced and it can…
The mechanism for triggering the universe inflation could be that at very early periods the time variable was discrete instead of smooth. Alternatively, and perhaps equivalently, it could be the consequence that the metrics of the early…
We put the upper bound on the gravitational waves (GWs) induced by the scalar-field fluctuations during the inflation. In particular, we focus on the case where the scalar fluctuations get amplified within some subhorizon scales by some…
We propose a novel scenario to generate primordial magnetic fields during inflation induced by an oscillating coupling of the electromagnetic field to the inflaton. This resonant mechanism has two key advantages over previous proposals.…
Oscillons are dense objects that may be copiously produced in the preheating period after inflation, during which what role general relativity might play is largely unknown. We investigate the oscillon preheating scenario in full general…
We study an inflation model with a flat scalar potential supported by observations and find that slow-roll inflation can emerge after a quasi-cyclic phase of the Universe, where it undergoes repeated expansions and contractions for a finite…
We identify a characteristic pattern in the scalar-induced stochastic gravitational wave background from particle production during inflation. If particle production is sufficiently efficient, the scalar power spectrum exhibits…
Within the framework of an explicit dynamical model, in which we calculate the radiatively-corrected, tree-level potential that sets up inflation, we show that the inflaton can be a significant part of dark matter today. We exhibit…