Related papers: Remarks on Inflation
Inflationary cosmology predicts that the particle horizon should be generically much bigger than the present-day Hubble radius, $1/H_0$. This implies a special regime of super-Hubble scale energy density fluctuations imprinted on the cosmic…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
After a brief review of the theory of cosmological perturbations, I highlight some recent progress in the area of reheating in inflationary cosmology, focusing in particular on parametric amplification of super-Hubble cosmological…
In this paper we put forward the idea that the comoving Hubble horizon undergoes multiple stages of contraction (a.k.a. inflationary phase) and expansion. The observable inflation, that produces the CMB anisotropies and generates primordial…
Most models of inflation have small parameters, either to guarantee sufficient inflation or the correct magnitude of the density perturbations. In this paper we show that, in supersymmetric theories with weak scale supersymmetry breaking,…
We study the process whereby quantum cosmological perturbations become classical within inflationary cosmology. By setting up a master-equation formulation we show how quantum coherence for super-Hubble modes can be destroyed by their…
We show that in generic supergravity theories the mass of the moduli during inflation is larger (or at least of the same order of magnitude) than the Hubble constant. This fact does not depends on the details of the inflation and on the…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
Most models of inflation have small parameters, either to guarantee sufficient inflation or the correct magnitude of the density perturbations. In this paper we show that, in supersymmetric theories with weak scale supersymmetry breaking,…
In the hope of avoiding model dependence of the cosmological observables, phenomenological parametrizations of Cosmic Inflation have recently been proposed. Typically, they are expressed in terms of two parameters associated with an…
The recently proposed trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (TCC) seems to require that the energy scale of inflation is significantly lower than the Planck scale $(H_\text{inf}<10^{-20} \Mpl)$. This, in turn, implies that the…
We compute the rate with which super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations are decohered during inflation, by their gravitational interactions with unobserved shorter-wavelength scalar and tensor modes. We do so using Open Effective Field Theory…
We investigate the circumstances under which cosmic inflation can arise from very inhomogeneous initial conditions using numerical relativity simulations. Previous studies have not considered cases with non-zero momentum density due to…
The recent Planck results and future releases on the horizon present a key opportunity to address a fundamental question in inflationary cosmology of whether primordial density perturbations have a quantum or thermal origin, i.e. whether…
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…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
We briefly review several Higgs inflation models and discuss their cosmological implications. We first classify the inflation models according to the predicted value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio: (i) $r = {\cal O}(0.01-0.1)$, (ii) $r =…