Related papers: Testing Inflation with Small Scale CMB Anisotropie…
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…
Cosmologists have embraced a particular ad hoc formula for the primordial power spectrum from inflation for universes with $\Omega_0 < 1$. However, the so-called ``Open Inflation'' models, which are attracting renewed interest in the…
If an adiabatic density perturbation is responsible for large scale structure and the cmb anisotropy, its spectral index $n$ will be measured in the forseeable future with an accuracy $\Delta n\sim .01$. This is precisely the kind of…
A detection of excess cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode polarization on large scales allows the possibility of measuring not only the amplitude of these fluctuations but also their scale dependence, which can be parametrized as the…
Forthcoming missions probing the absolute intensity of the CMB are expected to be able to measure spectral distortions, which are deviations from its blackbody distribution. As cosmic inflation can induce spectral distortions, these…
We explore a model of the early universe in which the inflationary epoch is preceded by a cosmic bounce, and argue that this scenario provides a common origin to several of the anomalous features that have been observed at large angular…
In this talk we elaborate on a mechanism to generate local contributions to the curvature perturbation in isolated patches of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). The mechanism, based on the generation of an out-of-equilibrium…
Analysis of the Planck 2018 data set indicates that the statistical properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies are in excellent agreement with previous studies using the 2013 and 2015 data releases. In…
We point out that if quantum field renormalization is taken into account the predictions of slow-roll inflation for both the scalar and tensorial power spectra change significantly for wavelengths that today are at observable scales
Anisotropic inflation is an interesting model with an U(1) gauge field and it predicts the statistical anisotropy of the curvature perturbation characterized by a parameter $g_*$. However, we find that the background gauge field does not…
Gaussianity of the cosmological perturbations in the universe is one of the key predictions of standard inflation, but it is violated by other models of structure formation such as topological defects. We present the first test of the…
The recent Planck data on the power spectrum of temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background marginally support deviations from the $\Lambda$CDM model at several multipoles. With a view towards current and forthcoming…
The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…
Next-to-leading order expressions related to Stewart-Lyth inverse problem are used to determine the inflationary models with a tensorial power spectrum described by a scale-invariant spectral index. Beyond power-law inflation, solutions are…
CMB anisotropies are modified by the weak lensing effect of intervening large scale structures on the photon path from the last scattering surface to the observer. This has to be accounted for when observational data of sensitive…
I comment on the predictive power of inflation and recent CMB measurements.
We study the perspectives to extract information about the microphysical parameters that governed the reheating process after cosmic inflation from CMB data. We identify conditions under which the inflaton coupling to other fields can be…
The inflationary paradigm is extremely successful regarding predictions of temperature anisotropies in the CMB. However, inflation also makes predictions for a CMB B-mode polarization, which has not been detected. Moreover, the standard…
The measurement of B-mode polarization of the cosmic microwave background at large angular scales by the BICEP experiment suggests a stochastic gravitational wave background from early-universe inflation with a surprisingly large amplitude.…
The advent of high signal-to-noise cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy experiments now allow detailed studies on the statistics related to temperature fluctuations. The existence of acoustic oscillations in the anisotropy power…