Related papers: "Graceful" Old Inflation
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…
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe may be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In the…
A semi-classical analysis of vacuum energy in the expanding spacetime suggests that the cosmological term decays with time, with a concomitant matter production. For early times we find, in Planck units, $\Lambda \approx H^4$, where H is…
We present an inflationary model that is geodesically complete and does not suffer from the transplanckian problem. In most inflationary models, massless (conformal) scalar field fluctuations in a deSitter background gives rise to a…
In this work we construct a formalism that can reveal the general characteristics of classes of viable $F(R)$ inflationary theories. The assumptions we make is that the slow-roll era occurs, and that the de Sitter scalaron mass $m^2(R)$ of…
A Friedman cosmology is investigated based on scalar-tensor gravitation with general metric coupling and scalar potential functions. We show that for a broad class of such functions, the scalar field can be dynamically trapped using a…
We briefly review the arising of an inflationary phase in the Universe evolution in order to discuss an inhomogeneous cosmological solution in presence of a real self interacting scalar field minimally coupled to gravity in the region of a…
A particular compensation-type solution of the main cosmological constant problem has been proposed recently, with two massless vector fields dynamically canceling an arbitrary cosmological constant \Lambda. The naive expectation is that…
It is well known that light scalar fields present during inflation are coherently excited. We show that if the field couples to gravity in a non-minimal way, the fluctuations at large scales are suppressed with respect to the small scales…
A continuous process of creation of particles is investigated as a possible connection between the inflationary stage with late cosmic acceleration. In this model, the inflationary era occurs due to a continuous and fast process of creation…
It has been argued that oscillatory features from spectator fields in the primordial power spectrum could be a probe of alternatives to inflation. In this work, we soften this claim by showing that the frequency and amplitude dependence of…
Cosmological perturbations generated during inflation exhibit striking quantum features, including entanglement and high circuit complexity. Yet their observational signatures remain effectively indistinguishable from classical stochastic…
In order to draw out the essential behavior of the universe, investigations of early universe cosmology often reduce the complex system to a simple integrable system. Inflationary models are of this kind as they focus on simple scalar field…
The basic properties of oscillons -- localized, long-lived, time-dependent scalar field configurations -- are briefly reviewed, including recent results demonstrating how their existence depends on the dimensionality of spacetime. Their…
A remarkable prediction of the Standard Model is that, in the absence of corrections lifting the energy density, the Higgs potential becomes negative at large field values. If the Higgs field samples this part of the potential during…
We study a gravitational model with curvature-squared $R^2$ and curvature-quartic $R^4$ nonlinearities. The effective scalar degree of freedom $\phi$ (scalaron) has a multi-valued potential $U(\phi)$ consisting of a number of branches.…
We investigate, in a model-independent way, the conditions required to obtain a satisfactory model of extended inflation in which inflation is brought to an end by a first-order phase transition. The constraints are that the correct present…
We study the problem of obtaining de Sitter and inflationary vacua from dimensional reduction of double field theory (DFT) on nongeometric string backgrounds. In this context, we consider a new class of effective potentials that admit…
In scale-invariant models of fundamental physics, mass scales are generated by spontaneous symmetry breaking. In this work, we study inflation in scale-invariant $R^2$ gravity, in which the Planck mass is generated by a scalar field, which…
During inflation, there is a preferred reference frame in which the expansion of the background spacetime is spatially isotropic. In contrast to Minkowski spacetime, observables can depend on the velocity of the system with respect to this…