Related papers: Elastic Inflation
This paper is a major revision of our previous work on the HST model of inflation. We identify the local fluctuations of the metric with fluctuations of the mass and angular momentum of black holes, and show that the consistency conditions…
We discuss metric perturbations produced during a period of inflation in the early universe where two scalar fields evolve. The final scalar perturbation spectrum can be calculated in terms of the perturbed expansion along neighbouring…
Understanding the behavior of the universe at large depends critically on insights about the smallest units of matter and their fundamental interactions. Inflationary cosmology is a highly successful framework for exploring these…
Dynamical models of inflation are given with composite inflatons by means of massive supersymmetric gauge theory. Nearly flat directions and stable massive ones in the potential are identified and slow-roll during inflation is examined.…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
A double hybrid inflationary scenario in non-minimal supergravity which can predict values of the tensor-to-scalar ratio up to about 0.05 is presented. Larger values of this ratio would require unacceptably large running of the scalar…
Inflation is known to be generically eternal to the future: the false vacuum is thermalized in some regions of space, while inflation continues in other regions. Here, we address the question of whether inflation can also be eternal to the…
The inflationary scenario has become the paradigm of early universe cosmology, and - in conjuction with ideas from superstring theory - has led to speculations about an "inflationary multiverse". From a point of view of phenomenology, the…
It is conjectured that inflation, taking account of quantum gravity, leads to a discrete spectrum of cosmological perturbations, instead of the continuous Gaussian spectrum predicted by standard field theory in an unquantized background.…
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…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
I discuss the current status of inflationary cosmology in light of the recent WMAP 3-year data release. The basic predictions of inflation are all supported by the data. Inflation also makes predictions which have not been well tested by…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
Models of cosmic inflation posit an early phase of accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields in curved spacetime. Though detailed assumptions about fields and couplings vary across models,…
A viable model for inflation driven by a torsion function in a Friedmann background is presented. The scalar spectral index in the interval $0.92\lesssim n_{s}\lesssim 0.97$ is obtained in order to satisfy the initial conditions for…
We investigate the inflationary universe in a theory where two scalar fields non-minimally coupling to the scalar curvature and an extra $R^2$ term exist and the conformal invariance is broken. In particular, the slow-roll inflation is…
Mass inflation is a well established instability, conventionally associated to Cauchy horizons (which are also inner trapping horizons) of stationary geometries, leading to a divergent exponential buildup of energy. We show here that finite…
From a model-building perspective, the inflationary sector might very well have no direct couplings to other species, apart from inevitable gravitational interactions. Within the context of General Relativity, a thermal universe can still…
We explore a fluid description of the inflationary universe. In particular, we investigate a fluid model in which the equation of state (EoS) for a fluid includes bulk viscosity. We find that the three observables of inflationary cosmology:…
We provide a comprehensive numerical study of the Emergent Cyclic Inflation scenario. This is a scenario where instead of traditional monotonic slow roll inflation, the universe expands over numerous short asymmetric cycles due to the…