Related papers: The End for Extended Inflation?
In inflation cosmologies, cosmic structure develops through the gravitational instability of the inevitable quantum noise in primordial scalar fields. I show how the acceleration of the universe defines the shape of the primordial spectrum…
In a recent paper, which has been published in Nature, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) obtained an upper limit on the stochastic gravitational-wave background of cosmological origin by using the data from a two-year science run of…
According to the famous Lyth bound, one can confirm large field inflation by finding tensor modes with sufficiently large tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. Here we will try to answer two related questions: Is it possible to rule out all large…
Inflationary models, especially those with plateau-type potentials, are consistent with the cosmological data, but inflation itself does not resolve the initial singularity. This singularity is resolved, for example, by the idea of the…
A brief account is given of large-scale structure modelling based on the assumption that the initial perturbations arise from inflation. A recap is made of the implications of inflation for large-scale structure; under the widely applicable…
The trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (TCC) puts an upper bound on the life-time of de Sitter spacetimes. It has immediate consequences for inflationary cosmology. In the standard paradigm, the universe has experienced a single stage of…
We discuss two important modifications of inflationary paradigm. Until very recently we believed that inflation automatically leads to flatness of the universe, Omega = 1. We also thought that post-inflationary phase transitions in GUTs may…
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…
Cosmologists have developed a phenomenally successful picture of structure in the universe based on the idea that the universe expanded exponentially in its earliest moments. There are three pieces of evidence for this exponential expansion…
We show that multi-field inflationary models with negligible turning in field space during inflation can lead to an effective sourcing of adiabatic from entropic perturbations {\it after} the end of inflation. We illustrate this general…
We propose direct tests of very high energy first-order phase transitions, which are elusive to collider physics, deploying the gravitational waves measurements. We show that first-order phase transitions lying into a large window of…
In the standard picture, the inflationary universe is in a supercooled state which ends with a short time, large scale reheating period, after which the universe goes into a radiation dominated stage. An alternative is proposed here in…
We study the details of eternal inflation in the presence of a spectator Higgs field within the framework of the minimal Standard Model. We have recently shown that in the presence of scalar field(s) which allow inflation only within a…
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…
Non-commutative geometry indicates a deformation of the energy-momentum dispersion relation $f(E)\equiv\frac{E}{pc}(\neq 1)$ for massless particles. This distorted energy-momentum relation can affect the radiation dominated phase of the…
We investigate a class of models of topological inflation in which a super-Hubble-sized global monopole seeds inflation. These models are attractive since inflation starts from rather generic initial conditions, but their not so attractive…
We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary…
We investigate the effects of non-zero spatial curvature on cosmic inflation in the light of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from the Planck 2018 legacy release and from the 2015 observing season of BICEP2 and the…
We study the observable implications of an incomplete first order phase transition during inflation. In such a phase transition, the nucleated bubbles do not percolate and instead are continuously produced until the onset of reheating. The…
At the end of the inflationary stage of the early universe, profuse particle production leads to the reheating of the universe. Such explosive particle production is due to parametric amplification of quantum fluctuations for the unbroken…