Related papers: Stochastic Inflation: New Results
The formalism of stochastic inflation is a powerful tool for analyzing the backreaction of cosmological perturbations, and making precise predictions for inflationary observables. We demonstrate this with the simple $m^2\phi^2$ model of…
The stochastic inflation program is a framework for understanding the dynamics of a quantum scalar field driving an inflationary phase. Though widely used and accepted, there have over recent years been serious criticisms of this theory. In…
We present a review on the state-of-the-art of the mathematical framework known as stochastic inflation, paying special attention to its derivation and giving references for the readers interested on results coming from the application of…
This article is dedicated to the memory of Alexei Starobinsky. I begin with some recollections of him and then review the generalization of his wonderful stochastic formalism from scalar potential models to theories which interact with…
These lecture notes have been written for a short introductory course on the status of inflation after Planck and BICEP2, given at the Xth Modave School of Mathematical Physics. The first objective is to give an overview of the theory of…
Power spectra play an important role in the theory of inflation, and their ability to reproduce current observational data to high accuracy is often considered a triumph of inflation, largely because of a lack of credible alternatives. In…
We prove that the stochastic and standard field-theoretical approaches produce exactly the same results for the amount of light massive scalar field fluctuations generated during inflation in the leading order of the slow-roll…
We identify the effective theory describing inflationary super-Hubble scales and show it to be a special case of effective field theories appropriate to open systems. Open systems allow information to be exchanged between the degrees of…
We point out that the ability of some models of inflation, such as Higgs inflation and the universal attractor models, in reproducing the available data is due to their relation to the Starobinsky model of inflation. For large field values,…
Cosmic inflation may exhibit stochastic periods during which quantum fluctuations dominate over the semi-classical evolution. Extracting observables in these regimes is a notoriously difficult program as quantum randomness makes them fully…
This paper contains a detailed study of the properties of a simple model attempting to explain dark energy as originated from quantum fluctuations of a light spectator scalar field in inflation. In [1] we recently outlined how Starobinsky's…
During inflation explicit perturbative computations of quantum field theories which contain massless, non-conformal fields exhibit secular effects that grow as powers of the logarithm of the inflationary scale factor. Starobinskii's…
The stochastic approach aims at describing the long-wavelength part of quantum fields during inflation by a classical stochastic theory. It is usually formulated in terms of Langevin equations, giving rise to a Fokker-Planck equation for…
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…
In this paper, we explore the equivalence between two theories, namely f(R) and scalar-tensor theories of gravity. We use this equivalence to explore several f(R) toy models focusing on the inflation epoch of the early universe. The study…
We present a new, recursive approach to stochastic inflation which is self-consistent and solves multiple problems which plagued a certain number of previous studies, in particular in realistic contexts where the background spacetime is…
We investigate a standard minimally-coupled scalar-field inflationary scenario, which is based on a new potential, with suitably generalized plateau features, that leads to extra small tensor-to-scalar ratios. In particular, we consider a…
An inflationary model in the framework of noncommutative space-time may generate a nontrivial running of the scalar spectral index, but usually induces a large tensor-to-scalar ratio simultaneously. With the latest observational data from…
In this work, we analyze two possible alternative and model-independent approaches to describe the inflationary period. The first one assumes a general equation of state during inflation due to Mukhanov, while the second one is based on the…
We adopt methods from statistical field theory to stochastic inflation. For the example of a free test field in de Sitter and power-law inflation, the power spectrum of long-wavelength fluctuations is computed. We study its dependence on…