Related papers: What happens when the inflaton stops during inflat…
We study an inflationary scenario where thermal inflation is followed by fast-roll inflation. This is a rather generic possibility based on the effective potentials of spontaneous symmetry breaking in the context of particle physics models.…
We study the decay of scalar fields, in particular the inflaton, into lighter scalars in a De Sitter spacetime background. After providing a practical definition of the rate, we focus on the case of an inflaton interacting with a massless…
We present an inflationary model that is geodesically complete and does not suffer from the transplanckian problem. In most inflationary models, massless (conformal) scalar field fluctuations in a deSitter background gives rise to a…
We study models of inflation where the inflaton corresponds to a flat direction in field space and its mass term is generated by gravity mediated soft supersymmetry breaking at high scale. Assuming the inflaton to have non negligible…
We study multifield contributions to the scalar power spectrum in an ensemble of six-field inflationary models obtained in string theory. We identify examples in which inflation occurs by chance, near an approximate inflection point, and we…
We consider D-term inflation for small couplings of the inflaton to matter fields. Standard hybrid inflation then ends at a critical value of the inflaton field that exceeds the Planck mass. During the subsequent waterfall transition the…
We describe a new mechanism that gives rise to dissipation during cosmic inflation. In the simplest implementation, the mechanism requires the presence of a massive scalar field with a softly-broken global $U(1)$ symmetry, along with the…
We argue that $isotropic$ scalar fluctuations in solid inflation are adiabatic in the super-horizon limit. During the solid phase this adiabatic mode has peculiar features: constant energy-density slices and comoving slices do not coincide,…
There are many inflationary models in which inflaton field does not satisfy the slow-roll condition. However, in such models, it is always difficult to generate the curvature perturbation during inflation. Thus, to generate the curvature…
Simple models of single-field inflation in the very early universe can generate the observed amplitude and scale dependence of the primordial density perturbation, but models with multiple fields can provide an equally good fit to current…
Correlated adiabatic and isocurvature perturbation modes are produced during inflation through an oscillation mechanism when extra scalar degrees of freedom other than the inflaton field are present. We show that this correlation…
We analyze the impact of breaking diffeomorphism invariance in the inflaton sector. In particular, we consider inflaton models which are invariant under the subgroup of transverse diffeomorphisms and address the possibility of implementing…
In this paper we analyze scalar gravitational perturbations on a Robertson-Walker background in the presence of multiple scalar fields that take values on a (geometrically non-trivial) field manifold during slow-roll inflation. For this…
The possibility that the scale-invariant inflationary spectrum may be modified due to the hidden assumptions about the Planck scale physics -- dubbed as trans-Planckian inflation -- has received considerable attention. To mimic the possible…
We propose a new version of the hybrid inflation scenario that produces a significantly tilted n>1 spectrum of curvature perturbations. This may happen in supersymmetric models where the inflaton field acquires a mass proportional to the…
In the transition between inflation and reheating, the curvature scalar typically undergoes oscillations which have significant impact on the density of gravitationally produced particles. The commonly used adiabatic vacuum prescription for…
We study the second-order gauge-invariant adiabatic and isocurvature perturbations in terms of the scalar fields present during inflation, along with the related fully non-linear space gradient of these quantities. We discuss the relation…
We consider the non-equilibrium evolution of the inflaton field coupled to both lighter scalars and fermions. The dissipational dynamics of this field is studied and found to be quite different than that believed in inflationary models. In…
The inflaton field responsible for inflation may not be a canonical fundamental scalar. It is possible that the inflaton is a composite of fermions or it may have a decay width. In these cases the standard procedure for calculating the…
We study the dynamics of inflation driven by an adiabatic self-gravitating medium, extending the previous works on fluid and solid inflation. Such a class of media comprises perfect fluids, zero and finite temperature solids. By using an…