Related papers: Graceful Exit in Extended Inflation and Implicatio…
We follow the evolution of the curvaton on superhorizon scales and check that the spectral tilt of the curvaton perturbations is unchanged as the curvaton becomes non-relativistic. Both inflation and pre-big bang cosmology can be treated…
According to the common wisdom, between a fraction of the mHz and few Hz the spectral energy density of the inflationary gravitons can be safely disregarded even assuming the most optimistic sensitivities of the space-borne detectors. In…
Standard CMB analysis assumes a direct deterministic mapping between the multipole probed by the CMB $\ell$ and the primordial wavenumber $k$. Since the recombination era has a finite duration, this mapping is probabilistic by construction.…
I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…
We constrain the primordial fluctuation spectrum P(k) by using the new data on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) from the Boomerang and MAXIMA experiments. Our study is based on slow-roll inflationary models, and we consider the…
A particularly attractive feature of inflation is that quantum fluctuations in the inflaton field may have seeded inhomogeneities in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and the formation of large-scale structure. In this paper, we…
An interesting test on the nature of the Universe is to measure the global spatial curvature of the metric in a model independent way, at a level of $|\Omega_k|<10^{-4}$, or, if possible, at the cosmic variance level of the amplitude of the…
We revisit an inflationary scenario in which primordial inhomogeneities arise from a quantum collapse, a stochastic mechanism described in the context of quantum collapse theories in its continuous version and within semiclassical gravity.…
We have proposed a new class of inflationary scenarios in which the first stage of expansion is driven by "old" false vacuum inflation. This ends by nucleation of a bubble, which then further inflates. Unlike the standard slow-roll…
A model of a universe without big bang singularity is presented, which displaysanearly inflationary period ending just before a phase transition to a deflationary epoch. The model produces enough heavy particles so as to reheat the universe…
We consider the effects on the primordial power spectrum of a period of radiation-dominated expansion prior to the inflationary era. If inflation lasts a total of only 60 e-folds or so, the boundary condition for quantum modes cannot be…
The temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background observed by COBE provide strong support for an inflationary phase in the early universe, below the GUT scale. We argue that a singlet field in a hidden sector of an effective…
Data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are discriminating between different models of inflation, disfavoring simple monomial potentials whilst being consistent with models whose predictions resemble those of the Starobinsky $R + R^2$…
We introduce super exponential inflation ($\omega < -1$) from a 5D Riemann-flat canonical metric on which we make a dynamical foliation. The resulting metric describes a super accelerated expansion for the early universe well-known as super…
I present a pedagogical review of inflation and the cosmic microwave background. I describe how a short period of accelerated expansion can replace the special initial conditions of the standard big bang model. I also describe the…
Bouncing models of cosmology, as they arise e.g. in loop quantum cosmology, can be followed by an inflationary phase and generate close-to-scale-invariant fluctuation spectra as observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However,…
We survey observational constraints on the parameter space of inflation and axions and map out two allowed windows: the classic window and the inflationary anthropic window. The cosmology of the latter is particularly interesting;…
We address the possibility of bounding the spectral index $n$ of primordial density fluctuations, using both the cosmic microwave background (cmb) anisotropy and data on galaxies and clusters. Each piece of galaxy and cluster data is…
We show that there are inflationary models for which perturbations in the energy momentum tensor, which are of second order in the scalar field, cannot be neglected. We first specify the conditions under which the usual first order…
Loop quantum cosmology allows to replace the original singularity by a quantum bounce followed by a phase of fast expansion called super-inflation. In this paper, we use a simple analytic description of super-inflation using the equation of…