Related papers: Constraining the inflaton potential with gravitati…
We explore cosmological magnetogenesis in the post-inflationary universe, when the inflaton oscillates around its potential minimum and the universe is effectively dominated by cold matter. During this epoch prior to reheating, large-scale…
We study the observable implications of an incomplete first order phase transition during inflation. In such a phase transition, the nucleated bubbles do not percolate and instead are continuously produced until the onset of reheating. The…
We construct a hybrid-inflation model where the inflaton potential is generated radiatively, as gauge symmetries guarantee it to be accidentally flat at tree level. The model can be regarded as a small-field version of Natural Inflation,…
We develop a possible cosmology for a Universe with n additional spatial dimensions of variable scale, and an associated scalar field, the radion, which is distinct from the field responsible for inflation, the inflaton. Based on a…
We calculate the spectrum of gravitational waves generated during inflation in open $(\Omega _0<1)$ inflationary models. In such models an initial epoch of old inflation solves the horizon and flatness problems, and during this first epoch…
In an alternative mechanism recently proposed, adiabatic cosmological perturbations are generated at the decay of the inflaton field due to small fluctuations of its coupling to matter. This happens whenever the coupling is governed by the…
We study oscillons, extremely long-lived localized oscillations of a scalar field, with three different potentials: quartic, sine-Gordon model and in a new class of convex potentials. We use an absorbing boundary at the end of the lattice…
We propose a new preheating mechanism through the coupling of the gravitational field to both the inflaton and matter fields, without direct inflaton-matter couplings. The inflaton transfers power to the matter fields through interactions…
We study a class of non-local, action-based, and purely gravitational models. These models seek to describe a cosmology in which inflation is driven by a large, bare cosmological constant that is screened by the self-gravitation between the…
The stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background provides a fascinating window to the physics of the very early universe. Beyond the nearly scale-invariant primordial GW spectrum produced during inflation, a spectrum with a much richer…
The phenomenon of resonant production of particles {\it after} inflation has received much attention in the past few years. In a new application of resonant production of particles, we consider the effect of a resonance {\em during}…
We show that a quadratic $U(1)$-breaking term, together with an effective chemical potential induced by a dimension five derivative coupling between the inflaton and the $U(1)$ current, can drive efficient particle production during…
The evolution of the universe started from a hot and dense Big Bang point. Temperature fluctuation map of cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation and initial seeds of large scale structures (LSS) are explained by an inflationary period…
Oscillons are extremely long-lived, spatially-localized field configurations in real-valued scalar field theories that slowly lose energy via radiation of scalar waves. Before their eventual demise, oscillons can pass through (one or more)…
We propose a non-oscillatory no-scale supergravity model of inflation (NO-NO inflation) in which the inflaton does not oscillate at the end of the inflationary era. Instead, the Universe is then dominated by the inflaton kinetic energy…
In the very early Universe matter can be described as a conformal invariant ultra-relativistic perfect fluid, which does not contribute, on classical level, to the evolution of the isotropic and homogeneous metric. However, in this…
In this talk, I review briefly a scenario for the evolution of a string-inspired cosmological model, in which condensates of primordial gravitational waves (GW), formed at the very early eras after the Big Bang, are considered responsible…
We derive a microscopic bound on the maximal field variation of the inflaton during warped D-brane inflation. By a result of Lyth, this implies an upper limit on the amount of gravitational waves produced during inflation. We show that a…
Observations of the cosmic microwave sky are revealing the primordial non-uniformities from which all structure in the Universe grew. The only known physical mechanism for generating the inhomogeneities we see involves the amplification of…
Oscillations in the frequency profile of the scalar-induced contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background are a characteristic signal for small-scale features during inflation. We investigate how this oscillatory frequency…