Related papers: Pure Natural Inflation Passes the ACT
I present a pedagogical review of inflation and the cosmic microwave background. I describe how a short period of accelerated expansion can replace the special initial conditions of the standard big bang model. I also describe the…
We show that both the baryon asymmetry of the Universe and the dark matter abundance can be explained within a single framework that makes use of maximally helical hypermagnetic fields produced during pseudoscalar inflation and the chiral…
A new shifted hybrid inflationary scenario is introduced which, in contrast to the older one, relies only on renormalizable superpotential terms. This scenario is automatically realized in a concrete extension of the "minimal"…
We study constraints on the natural inflation model from the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). Inflaton \phi for the natural inflation has a potential of the form V=\Lambda^4[1-\cos(\phi/\sqrt{2}f_\phi)], which is parametrized…
We study the Hybrid Natural Inflation (HNI) model and some of its realisations in the light of recent CMB observations, mainly Planck temperature and WMAP-9 polarization, and compare with the recent release of BICEP2 dataset. The…
We propose a new class of natural inflation models based on a hidden scale invariance. In a very generic Wilsonian effective field theory with an arbitrary number of scalar fields, which exhibits scale invariance via the dilaton, the…
We investigate a compelling model of quintessential inflation in the context of $\alpha$-attractors, which naturally result in a scalar potential featuring two flat regions, the inflationary plateau and the quintessential tail. The…
Slow-roll inflation requires the inflaton field to have an exceptionally flat potential, which combined with measurements of the scale of inflation demands some degree of fine-tuning. Alternatively, the flatness of the potential could be…
At the level of heuristic effective dynamics, we investigate the cosmological inflation with holonomy corrections of loop quantum cosmology (LQC) in the $k=0$ Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model with a single inflaton field subject to a simple…
Power spectra always play an important role in the theory of inflation. In particular, the ability to reproduce the galaxy matter power spectrum and the CMB temperature angular power spectrum coefficients to high accuracy is often…
Recent ACT measurements favor a scalar spectral index n_s larger than the Planck value, posing a challenge to many single-field slow-roll inflation models. We show that a smooth, localized step in the inflaton potential can shift the…
Many models of high energy physics possess metastable vacua. It is conceivable that the universe can get trapped in such a false vacuum, irrespective of its origin and prior history, at an earlier stage during its evolution. The ensuing…
We consider here natural inflation in the low energy (two-derivative) metric-affine theory containing only the minimal degrees of freedom in the inflationary sector, i.e. the massless graviton and the pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson (PNGB).…
Extra-natural inflation is (de)constructed. Explicit models are compared with cosmological observations. The models successfully achieve trans-Planckian inflaton field excursions.
Single-field inflation, arguably the simplest and most compelling paradigm for the origin of our Universe, is strongly supported by the recent results of the Planck satellite and the BICEP2 experiment. The results from Planck, however, also…
Recently a new kind of quintessential inflation coming from the Lorentzian distribution has been introduced in [1,2]. The model leads to a very simple potential, which basically depends on two parameters, belonging to the class of…
Recent observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that a successful theory of cosmological inflation needs to have flat potential of the inflaton scalar field. Realizing the inflaton to be a pseudo-Nambu Goldstone boson…
We consider the eternal inflation scenario of the slow-roll/chaotic type with the additional element of an objective collapse of the wave function. The incorporation of this new agent to the traditional inflationary setting might represent…
We present a simplest inflationary scenario in the minimal left-right symmetric model with spontaneous D-parity breaking, which is a well motivated particle physics model for neutrino masses. This leads us to connect the observed…
In this note we present a simple but exact model of quasi-single field inflation \cite{Chen:2009zp, Chen:2009we}, in which the couplings between perturbations are completely controlled, and for instance can be made constant with any desired…