Related papers: Recent progress on inflation and dark energy from …
If cosmic inflation was driven by an electrically neutral scalar field stable on cosmological time scales, the field necessarily constitutes all or part of dark matter (DM). We study this possibility in a scenario where the inflaton field…
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
We study the cosmology of axions in the post-inflationary scenario, where random initial conditions and the ensuing string-domain-wall network generate an isocurvature power spectrum. Axions radiated from strings behave as warm, wave-like…
Closed string tachyon condensation in spacetime generates potentials on the worldsheet that model two-dimensional inflationary cosmology. These models illustrate and elucidate a variety of aspects of inflation, in particular the generation…
We use modular symmetry as an organizing principle that attempts to simultaneously address the lepton flavor puzzle, inflation, and post-inflationary reheating. We demonstrate this approach using the finite modular group $A_4$ in the lepton…
We derive the spectrum and analyse the detectability prospects of secondary gravity waves (GWs) associated to primordial black hole (PBH) production in a class of string inflationary models called Fibre Inflation. The inflationary potential…
We investigate the possibility of $D$-term inflation within the framework of type I string-inspired models. Although $D$-term inflation model has the excellent property that it is free from the so-called $\eta$- problem, two serious…
We have built a supersymmetric SO(10) model consistent with cosmological observations. The model gives rise to a false vacuum hybrid inflationary scenario which solves the monopole problem. We argue that this type of inflationary scenario…
Axion models have two serious cosmological problems, domain wall and isocurvature perturbation problems. In order to solve these problems we investigate the Linde's model in which the field value of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) scalar is large…
We investigate how inflation model selection is affected by the presence of additional free-streaming relativistic degrees of freedom, i.e. dark radiation. We perform a full Bayesian analysis of both inflation parameters and cosmological…
We study the realization of cosmic inflation in bigravity theories. By analyzing the evolution of scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations in de Sitter-like spacetimes, we find strong stability constraints on the class of viable vacua…
We study possible string theory compactifications which, in the low-energy limit, describe chaotic inflation with a stabilizer field. We first analyze type IIA setups where the inflationary potential arises from a D6-brane wrapping an…
After decades of successful hot big-bang paradigm, Cosmology still lacks a framework in which the early inflationary phase of the universe smoothly matches the radiation epoch and evolves to the present `quasi' de Sitter spacetime. No less…
A kinetic mixing between the axion and the inflaton allows for a production of axion dark matter even if the inflationary Hubble scale is smaller than the zero-temperature axion mass. We analyze the axion dynamics in this recently…
I review some aspects of obtaining inflation from string theory, in particular brane-antibrane inflation within the framework of KKLMMT, and racetrack inflation. Further, I discuss recent work on the problem of reheating after…
In the modulated reheating scenario, the field that drives inflation has a spatially varying decay rate, and the resulting inhomogeneous reheating process generates adiabatic perturbations. We examine the statistical properties of the…
I present an outline for cosmological evolution in the framework of string theory with emphasis on a phase of dilaton-driven kinetic inflation. It is shown that a typical background of stochastic gravitational radiation is generated, with…
We provide a pedagogical overview of inflation in string theory. Our theme is the sensitivity of inflation to Planck-scale physics, which we argue provides both the primary motivation and the central theoretical challenge for the subject.…
We present a mechanism for realizing hybrid inflation using two axion fields with a purely non-perturbatively generated scalar potential. The structure of scalar potential is highly constrained by the discrete shift symmetries of 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…