Related papers: Graceful Exit in Extended Inflation and Implicatio…
In low scale quantum gravity scenarios the fundamental scale of nature can be as low as TeV, in order to address the naturalness of the electroweak scale. A number of difficulties arise in constructing specific models; stabilisation of the…
We develop general criteria to construct unified frameworks for inflation and quintessence which employ a unique scalar field to drive both. By using such a minimal theoretical framework we avoid having to fine-tune couplings and…
We forecast the ability of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization datasets to constrain theories of eternal inflation using cosmic bubble collisions. Using the Fisher matrix formalism, we determine both the overall…
We compute the joint constraints on ten cosmological parameters from the latest CMB measurements. The lack of a significant second acoustic peak in the latest Boomerang and Maxima data favors models with more baryons than Big Bang…
We investigate inflation with a class of concave inflaton potentials of the form $\sim \phi^n$ $(0<n<1)$ in the Randall-Sundrum model with an infinite extra spatial dimension. We show that this class of models is much more in good agreement…
The cosmological fluid equations are used to study the nonlinear mode coupling of density fluctuations. We find that for realistic cosmological spectra there is a significant contribution to the nonlinear evolution on scales of interest 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 show that Inflation in a False Vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a spectator scalar field non minimally coupled to gravity. The field is unstable in this background, it grows exponentially and slows down the pure de Sitter phase…
Thermal inflation, a brief low energy inflation after the primordial inflation, resolves the moduli problem in the context of supersymmetric cosmology. In the thermal inflation scenario, the primordial power spectrum is modestly redshifted…
We observe that when a local patch in a radiation filled Robertson-Walker universe inflates by some reason, outside perturbations can enter into the inflating region. Generally, the physical wavelengths of these perturbations become larger…
We present here the effective theory of inflation `a la Ginsburg-Landau in which the inflaton potential is a polynomial. The slow-roll expansion becomes a systematic 1/N expansion where N ~ 60. The spectral index and the ratio of…
The usual inflationary scenario predicts a Gaussian random primordial density fluctuation, different Fourier modes of which do not correlate with each other. In this paper we propose a correlation between these different modes. A simple…
The pre-big-bang cosmology inspired by superstring theories has been suggested as an alternative to slow-roll inflation. We analyze, in both the Jordan and Einstein frames, the effect of spatial curvature on this scenario and show that too…
We explore constraints on the spectral index $n$ of density fluctuations and the neutrino energy density fraction $\Omega_{HDM}$, employing data from a variety of large scale observations. The best fits occur for $n\approx 1$ and…
The recent data from the Boomerang and MAXIMA-1 balloon flights have marked the beginning of the precision era of Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy (CMB) measurements. We investigate the observational constraints from the current CMB…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
Ultra-light axions ($m_a\lesssim 10^{-18}$eV), motivated by string theory, can be a powerful probe of the energy scale of inflation. In contrast to heavier axions the isocurvature modes in the ultra-light axions can coexist with observable…
We point out that the inclusion of a string component contributing around 5% to the CMB power spectrum amplitude on large scales can increase the preferred value of the spectral index n_s of density fluctuations measured by CMB experiments.…
We present a new approach to constructing inflationary models in closed universes. Conformal embedding of closed-universe models in a de Sitter background suggests a quantisation condition on the available conformal time. This condition…
We discuss the principles governing the selection of inflationary models for which preheating can affect the CMB. This is a (fairly small) subset of those models which have non-negligible entropy/isocurvature perturbations on large scales…