Related papers: When can preheating affect the CMB?
We survey recent calculations probing what constraints decoupling can put on the influence of very-high-energy physics on the predictions of inflation for the cosmic microwave background. Using garden-variety hybrid inflation models we…
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…
We point out that the theoretical predictions for the inflationary observables may be generically altered by the presence of fields which are heavier than the Hubble rate during inflation and whose dynamics is usually neglected. They…
The cosmological curvature perturbation may be generated when some `curvaton' field, different from the inflaton, oscillates in a background of unperturbed radiation. In its simplest form the curvaton paradigm requires the Hubble parameter…
It has been proposed that the successful inflationary description of density perturbations on cosmological scales is sensitive to the details of physics at extremely high (trans-Planckian) energies. We test this proposal by examining how…
As additional perturbative degrees of freedom, it is known that magnetic fields of inflationary origin can source curvature perturbations on super-Hubble scales. By requiring the magnetic generated curvature to remain smaller than its…
We study models of inflation with two scalar fields and non-canonical kinetic terms, focusing on the case in which the curvature and isocurvature perturbations are strongly coupled to each other. In the regime where a heavy mode can be…
We investigate the validity of effective field theory methods and the decoupling of heavy fields during inflation. Considering models of inflation in which the inflaton is coupled to a heavy (super-Hubble) degree of freedom initially in its…
Recently, it has been shown that during preheating the entropy modes circulating in the loops, which correspond to the inflaton decay products, meaningfully modify the cosmological correlation functions at superhorizon scales. In this…
The scalar perturbations in inflationary models, based on a two-component diagonal non-linear sigma model, are considered. For inhomogeneities generated at an inflationary stage, the law of motion of the comoving curvature ${\cal R}$ is…
We investigate density perturbations generated through modulated reheating while inflation is driven by a conformally coupled scalar field. A large running of the spectral index is obtained, which reflects the basic nature of conformal…
We consider the examples of single-field inflation models predicting large amplitudes of the curvature perturbation power spectrum at relatively small scales. It is shown that in models with an inflationary potential of double-well type the…
We estimate large-scale curvature perturbations from isocurvature fluctuations in the waterfall field during hybrid inflation, in addition to the usual inflaton field perturbations. The tachyonic instability at the end of inflation leads to…
We consider a two-field model for inflation where the second order metric perturbations can be amplified by a parametric resonance during preheating. We demonstrate that there can arise a considerable enhancement of non-Gaussianity sourced…
While cosmological inflation can erase primordial inhomogeneities, it is possible that inflation may not begin in a significantly inhomogeneous universe. This issue is particularly pressing in multifield scenarios, where even the…
It has been shown that sub-Planckian models of inflation require initial homogeneity on super-Hubble scales under certain commonly held assumptions. Here I remark on the possible implications of this result for inflationary cosmology.
Extending our previous work on the robustness of inflation to perturbations in the scalar field, we investigate the effects of perturbations in the transverse traceless part of the extrinsic curvature on the evolution of an inhomogeneous…
In single field inflationary models, preheating refers to the phase that immediately follows inflation, but precedes the epoch of reheating. During this phase, the inflaton typically oscillates at the bottom of its potential and gradually…
In a previous work we showed that large nongaussianities and nonscale-invariant distortions in the CMB power spectrum can be generated in hybrid inflation models, due to the contributions of the tachyon (waterfall) field to the second order…
Chromo-Natural Inflation is the first worked example of a model of inflation in which slow-roll inflation is achieved by "magnetic drift" as opposed to Hubble friction. In this work, we give an account of the perturbations at linear order…