Related papers: Precision of Inflaton Potential Reconstruction fro…
Fast robust methods for calculating likelihoods from CMB observations on small scales generally rely on approximations based on a set of power spectrum estimators and their covariances. We investigate the optimality of these approximation,…
String Theory and Supergravity allow, in principle, to follow the transition of the inflaton from pre-inflationary fast roll to slow roll. This introduces an infrared depression in the primordial power spectrum that might have left an…
We study the slow-roll inflation models, where the inflaton slow-rolls along a trajectory whose orthogonal directions are lifted by potentials with masses of order the Hubble parameter. In these models large non-Gaussianities can be…
We constrain several models of the early Universe that predict a statistical anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) sky. We make use of WMAP9 maps deconvolved with beam asymmetries. As compared to previous releases of WMAP…
There exists some evidence of a suppression in power in the CMB multipoles around $l \sim 20-30$. If taken seriously, this is in tension with the simplest inflationary models driven by a single scalar field with a standard type of slowly…
The unwinding inflation mechanism is studied in a type IIB flux compactification where all moduli are stabilized using flux, non-perturbative effects, and the leading alpha' corrections of the large volume scenario. We consider the…
We study the observational implications of a class of inflationary models wherein the inflaton is coupled to the Einstein tensor through a generalized non-minimal derivative coupling (GNMDC). In particular, we explore whether these models…
One method to reconstruct the scalar field potential of inflation is a perturbative approach, where the values of the potential and its derivatives are calculated as an expansion in departures from the slow-roll approximation. They can then…
We present Monte Carlo reconstruction, a new method for ``inverting'' observational data to constrain the form of the scalar field potential responsible for inflation. This stochastic technique is based on the flow equation formalism and…
This work is focused on the study of early time cosmology and in particular on the study of inflation. After an introduction on the standard Big Bang theory, we discuss the physics of CMB and we explain how its observations can be used to…
Though simple inflationary models describe the CMB well, their corrections are often plagued by infrared effects that obstruct a reliable calculation of late-time behaviour. We adapt to cosmology tools designed to address similar issues in…
We consider low scale slow roll inflation driven by the gauge invariant flat directions {\bf udd} and {\bf LLe} of the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model at the vicinity of a saddle point of the scalar potential. We study the stability…
We study reheating in $\alpha$-attractor models of inflation in which the inflaton couples to other scalars or fermions. We show that the parameter space contains viable regions in which the inflaton couplings to radiation can be determined…
We present a detailed systematics for comparing warped brane inflation with the observations, incorporating the effects of both moduli stabilization and ultraviolet bulk physics. We explicitly construct an example of the inflaton potential…
We study the effects of a class of features of the potential of slow-roll inflationary models corresponding to a step symmetrically dumped by an even power negative exponential factor, which we call local features. Local-type features…
We explore the dynamics and observational predictions of the Warm Little Inflaton scenario, presently the simplest realization of warm inflation within a concrete quantum field theory construction. We consider three distinct types of scalar…
Homogeneous and nearly-isotropic cosmological models are natural extensions of standard Friedmann cosmologies. Constraining their features is crucial, as any detection of their properties would impact our understanding of inflation and the…
In this work, we explore the prospect of generalizing the constant-roll condition in canonical inflationary model to non-canonical models. To find a natural generalization, we focus on three manifestations of this condition and construct…
In this talk we elaborate on a mechanism to generate local contributions to the curvature perturbation in isolated patches of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The mechanism, based on the generation of an out-of-equilibrium…
We calculate the spectrum of large angle cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies due to quantum fluctuations of the gravitational wave modes in one-bubble open inflation models. We find the bubble-wall fluctuation modes, which had…