Related papers: Multiple inflation and the WMAP 'glitches'
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
We study the production, spectrum and detectability of gravitational waves in models of the early Universe where first order phase transitions occur during inflation. We consider all relevant sources. The self-consistency of the scenario…
We study the generation of the primordial curvature perturbation in multi-field inflation. Considering both the evolution of the perturbation during inflation and the effects generated at the end of inflation, we present a general formula…
Recently, the Planck 2013 results showed possible evidence for a dipolar power modulation of the CMB temperature fluctuations at low--(\ell) multipoles. This anomaly might imply certain deviations from statistical isotropy. To incorporate…
We calculate how primordial anisotropies in the background space-time affect the evolution of cosmological perturbations for bouncing alternatives to inflation, like ekpyrosis and the matter bounce scenario. We find that the leading order…
We present an in depth discussion of the production of gravitational waves from an inflationary phase that could have occurred in the early universe, giving derivations for the resulting spectrum and energy density. We also consider the…
It is well known that processes of first order phase transitions may have occurred in the inflationary era. If one or more occurred well before the end of inflation, the nucleated bubbles are stretched to large scales and the primordial…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
We study the statistical nature of primordial fluctuations from an anisotropic inflation which is realized by a vector field coupled to an inflaton. We find a suitable gauge, which we call the canonical gauge, for anisotropic inflation by…
Spectrum of density perturbations in the Universe generated from quantum-gravitational fluctuations in slow-roll-over inflationary scenarios with the Brans-Dicke gravity is calculated. It is shown that after inflation the isocurvature mode…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…
We study the structure of multi-field inflation models where the primordial curvature perturbation is able to vigorously interact with an ultra-light isocurvature field -- a massless fluctuation orthogonal to the background inflationary…
We propose an inflationary primordial feature model that can explain both the large and small-scale anomalies in the currently measured cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy spectra, revealing a clip of adventurous history of the…
We study multifield contributions to the scalar power spectrum in an ensemble of six-field inflationary models obtained in string theory. We identify examples in which inflation occurs by chance, near an approximate inflection point, and we…
Scalar fields in the minimal supersymmetric standard model may have large field values during inflation. Because of approximate global symmetry, it is plausible that the phase directions of them are nearly massless during inflation and…
We analyse the implications for inflationary models of the cosmic microwave background (cmb) anisotropy measured by COBE. Vacuum fluctuations during inflation generate an adiabatic density perturbation, and also gravitational waves. The…
Recent combined results from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) provide a remarkable set of data which requires more accurate and general investigation. Here we derive formulae for the power…
We compute the primordial scalar, vector and tensor metric perturbations arising from quantum field inflation. Quantum field inflation takes into account the nonperturbative quantum dynamics of the inflaton consistently coupled to the…
We study the microwave background anisotropy due to superhorizon-size perturbations (the Grischuk-Zel'dovich effect) in open universes with negative spatial curvature. Using COBE results on the low-order temperature multipole moments, we…
In the standard slow-roll inflationary cosmology, quantum fluctuations in a single field, the inflaton, generate approximately Gaussian primordial density perturbations. At present, the bispectrum and trispectrum of the density…