Related papers: Hubble-Scale Tachyonic Shocks from Low-Scale Infla…
Inflation occurring at energy densities less than (10$^{14}$ GeV)$^4$ produces tensor perturbations too small to be measured by cosmological surveys. However, we show that it is possible to probe low scale inflation by measuring the mass of…
Whereas preheating after chaotic and hybrid inflation models has been abundantly studied in the literature, preheating in small field inflation models, where the curvature of the inflaton potential is negative during inflation, remains less…
We consider gravitational wave production due to parametric resonance at the end of inflation, or ``preheating''. This leads to large inhomogeneities which source a stochastic background of gravitational waves at scales inside the comoving…
The reheating of the universe after hybrid inflation proceeds through the nucleation and subsequent collision of large concentrations of energy density in the form of bubble-like structures moving at relativistic speeds. This generates a…
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 study the instability of a scalar field at the end of hybrid inflation, using both analytical techniques and numerical simulations. We improve previous studies by taking the inflaton field fully into account, and show that the range of…
We compute the rate with which super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations are decohered during inflation, by their gravitational interactions with unobserved shorter-wavelength scalar and tensor modes. We do so using Open Effective Field Theory…
Plateau inflation is an experimentally consistent framework in which the scale of inflation can be kept relatively low. Close to the edge of the plateau, scalar perturbations are subject to a strong tachyonic instability. Tachyonic…
We study the stability of the electroweak vacuum in low-scale inflation models whose Hubble parameter is much smaller than the instability scale of the Higgs potential. In general, couplings between the inflaton and Higgs are present, and…
We review the dynamics of spectator scalar fields non-minimally coupled to gravity in the post-inflationary Universe, with particular emphasis on scenarios where the end of inflation is followed by a period of kination. In this context, the…
We investigate chaotic inflation models with two scalar fields, such that one field (the inflaton) rolls while the other is trapped in a false vacuum state. The false vacuum becomes unstable when the inflaton field falls below some critical…
We identify universal signatures in the bispectrum arising from a transient tachyonic instability of entropic fluctuations during inflation, a phenomenon that naturally arises in hyperbolic field-space geometries. We perform exact numerical…
The Standard Model Higgs becomes tachyonic at high energy scales according to current measurements. This unstable regime of the Higgs potential can be realized in the early Universe during high scale inflation, potentially with catastrophic…
We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary…
In certain implementations of the brane inflationary paradigm, the exit from inflation occurs when the branes annihilate through tachyon condensation. We investigate various cosmological effects produced by this tachyonic era. We find that…
In the slow-roll inflationary scenario, the amplitude of the curvature perturbations approaches a constant value soon after the modes leave the Hubble radius. However, relatively recently, it was shown that the amplitude of the curvature…
I review the theory of preheating after inflation, focusing on the recently found tachyonic preheating in the theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. This occurs due to the tachyonic instability of the scalar field near the top of its…
We demonstrate that the strict upper bounds on the energy scale of inflation and on the tensor-to-scalar ratio can be somewhat relaxed if we assume that - after an initial period of slow rolling when scales probed today in CMB experiments…
In low scale quantum gravity scenarios the fundamental scale of nature can be as low as TeV, in order to address the naturalness of the electroweak scale. A number of difficulties arise in constructing specific models; stabilisation of the…
The energy scale of inflation is of much interest, as it suggests the scale of grand unified physics and also governs whether cosmological events such as topological defect formation can occur after inflation. The COBE results are used to…