Related papers: Amplifying the Cosmological Collider with Ghost Sp…
I review a string-inspired cosmological model, with gravitational anomalies present at very early epochs, which includes a totally antisymmetric torsion, that in (3+1)-dimensions is equivalent to a pseudoscalar (Kalb-Ramond, string-model…
Ghost inflation predicts almost scale-invariant primordial cosmological perturbations with relatively large non-Gaussianity. The bispectrum is known to have a large contribution at the wavenumbers forming an equilateral triangle and the…
We analyze the Galileon ghost condensate implementation of a bouncing cosmological model in the presence of a non negligible anisotropic stress. We exhibit its structure, which we find to be far richer than previously thought. In…
A scalar Higgs field can be repeatedly switched on and off when it couples to a classically oscillating scalar modulus field. The modulus flips the Higgs mass term between stable and tachyonic values. We study a cosmological scenario in…
The behaviour of oscillating scalar spectator fields after inflation depends on the thermal background produced by inflaton decay. Resonant decay of the spectator is often blocked by large induced thermal masses. We account for the finite…
In this article, we investigate a coupled phantom dark-energy cosmological model in which the coupling term between a phantom scalar field with an exponential potential and a pressureless dark-matter fluid is motivated by the warm…
Primordial non-Gaussianity is generated by interactions of the inflaton field, either self-interactions or couplings to other sectors. These two physically different mechanisms can lead to nearly indistinguishable bispectra of the…
We study the dynamics of the homogeneous and isotropic cosmological background in the recently proposed ``quantum phenomenological gravitational dynamics'', characterised by logarithmic corrections to the Bekenstein entropy. We show that…
We describe new scenarios of generating curvature perturbations when inflaton (curvaton) has significant interactions. We consider a ``spot'', which arises from interactions associated with enhanced symmetric point (ESP) on the trajectory.…
Kination dominated quintessence models of dark energy have the intriguing feature that the relic abundance of thermal cold dark matter can be significantly enhanced compared to the predictions from standard cosmology. Previous treatments of…
We investigate the stability against inhomogeneous perturbations and the appearance of ghost modes in Gauss-Bonnet gravitational theories with a non-minimally coupled scalar field, which can be regarded as either the dilaton or a…
Precise measurements of the microwave background anisotropy have confirmed the inflationary picture of approximately scale invariant, Gaussian primordial adiabatic density perturbations. However, there are some anomalies that suggest a…
We consider cosmological inflation generated by a scalar field slowly rolling off from a de Sitter maximum of its potential. The models belong to the class of hilltop models and represent the most general model of this kind in which the…
We consider a physically viable cosmological model that has a field dependent Gauss-Bonnet coupling in its effective action, in addition to a standard scalar field potential. The presence of such terms in the four dimensional effective…
We characterize graviton non-Gaussianities in models of inflation where de Sitter boosts are spontaneously broken. We discuss which of the symmetry breaking patterns studied in Nicolis et al., 2015 can sustain a period of quasi de Sitter…
We study a cosmological scenario in which inflation is preceded by a bounce. In this scenario, the primordial singularity, one of the major shortcomings of inflation, is replaced by a non-singular bounce, prior to which the universe…
A scalar-tensor model with Gauss-Bonnet and non-minimal kinetic couplings is considered, in which ghost modes are eliminated via a Lagrange multiplier constraint. A reconstruction procedure is deviced for the scalar potential and Lagrange…
In the framework of scalar-tensor theories of gravity, we construct a new kind of cosmological model that conflates inflation and ekpyrosis. During a phase of conflation, the universe undergoes accelerated expansion, but with crucial…
It has been shown that the observed dark matter (DM) abundance can be produced by amplification of quantum fluctuations of an energetically subdominant scalar field during inflation. In this paper, we study the robustness of this "spectator…
The universe's current acceleration is a pretty recent phenomenon in cosmological time scales. This means that the modes that have left our horizon since the beginning of the contemporary acceleration phase, have not really reached the…