Related papers: CMB quadrupole suppression: II. The early fast rol…
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…
The slow-roll approximation to inflation is ultimately justified by the presence of inflationary attractors for the orbits of the solutions of the dynamical equations in phase space. There are many indications that the inflaton field…
The lack of power on large scales (l < 40) might have been observed by the PLANCK satellite. We argue that this putative feature can be explained by a phase of fast roll at the onset of inflation. We show that in the context of single field…
I elaborate on a link between the string--scale breaking of supersymmetry that occurs in a class of superstring models and the onset of inflation. The link rests on spatially flat cosmologies supported by a scalar field driven by an…
We propose a model for cosmic inflation which is based on an effective description of strongly interacting, nonsupersymmetric matter within the framework of dynamical abelian projection and centerization. The underlying gauge symmetry is…
If inflation was preceded by a radiation era then at the time of inflation there will exist a decoupled thermal distribution of gravitons. Gravitational waves generated during inflation will be amplified by the process of stimulated…
Inflation is often described through the dynamics of a scalar field, slow-rolling in a suitable potential. Ultimately, this inflaton must be identified as the expectation value of a quantum field, evolving in a quantum effective potential.…
Massive fields during inflation provide an interesting opportunity to test new physics at very high energy scales. Meanwhile in fundamental realizations, the inflationary field space typically has a curved geometry, which may leave…
We investigate the quantum fluctuations of an inflaton field in a two-field model of one-bubble open inflation. One of the inflatons is assumed to be responsible for the first false vacuum stage of inflation and the other is assumed to be…
The universe might experience many cycles with different vacua. The slow-roll inflation may be preceded by kinetic-dominated contraction occurring in "adjacent" vacua during some cycles. In this report we briefly show this phenomenon may…
Potential slow-roll parameters are widely used in inflationary cosmology to estimate the scalar and tensor perturbation amplitudes and the scalar spectral index, although the inflationary observables are fundamentally expressed in terms of…
The BB-mode angular correlation power spectrum of CMB is obtained by considering the primordial gravitational waves in the squeezed vacuum state for various inflationary models and results are compared with the joint analysis of the…
A sizeable tensor-to-scalar ratio, such as recently claimed by BICEP2, would imply a scale of inflation at the typical scale of supersymmetric grand unification. This could be an accident, or strong support for supersymmetric theories.…
We derive analytic bounds on the shape of the primordial power spectrum in the context of single-field inflation. In particular, the steepest possible growth has a spectral index of $n_s - 1 = 4$ once transients have died down. Its primary…
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…
We present new single field inflationary scenarios that produce the critical abundance of primordial black holes as dark matter reconstructing the inflaton potential from an input power spectrum. The method is exact in the slow roll…
If the inflationary era is preceded by a radiation dominated era in which the inflaton too was in thermal equilibrium at some very early time then the CMB data places an upper bound on the comoving temperature of the (decoupled) inflaton…
We present a general framework where the effective field theory of single field inflation is extended by the inclusion of operators with mass dimension 3 and 4 in the unitary gauge. These higher dimensional operators introduce quartic and…
We derive general analytic formulae for the power spectrum and spectral index of the curvature perturbation produced during inflation driven by a multi-component inflaton field, up to the second order in the slow-roll approximation. We do…
We investigate the formation of large peaks in the inflationary curvature power spectrum from double-well potentials. In such scenarios, the initial CMB spectrum is created at large field values. Subsequently, the inflaton will cross one of…