Related papers: Generality of Topological Inflation
If our universe underwent inflation, its entropy during the inflationary phase was substantially lower than it is today. Because a low-entropy state is less likely to be chosen randomly than a high-entropy one, inflation is unlikely to…
We show that in a generic case of the pre-big-bang scenario, inflation will solve cosmological problems only if the universe at the onset of inflation is extremely large and homogeneous from the very beginning. The size of a homogeneous…
The abundance of the QCD axion is known to be suppressed if the Hubble parameter during inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is lower than the QCD scale, and if the inflation lasts sufficiently long. We show that the tight upper bound on the inflation…
Inflation with tunneling from a false to a true vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a scalar field that slows down the initial de Sitter phase. As a by-product this field also sets dynamically the value of the Newton constant observed…
According to previous work, topological defects expand exponentially without an end if the vacuum expectation value of the Higgs field is of the order of the Planck mass. We extend the study of inflating topological defects to the…
Classic inflation, the theory described in textbooks, is based on the idea that, beginning from typical initial conditions and assuming a simple inflaton potential with a minimum of fine-tuning, inflation can create exponentially large…
Small-field inflation typically requires rather special initial conditions to commence. It is proposed that in models where the inflaton is an axionlike field, with a periodic contribution to the potential, there is a possibility of…
Motivated by the question of how generic inflation is, I study the time-evolution of topological surfaces in an inhomogeneous cosmology with positive cosmological constant $\Lambda$. If matter fields satisfy the Weak Energy Condition,…
We propose a topological inflation model in the framework of supergravity with $R$ invariance. This topological inflation model is not only free from the initial value problem of the inflaton field but also gives low reheating temperature…
If in a finite universe, the tree-level vacuum is a symmetric superposition of coherent states, in each of which the inflaton field assumes a different, energy-minimizing mean value (vev), then the resulting energy is positive and decreases…
Current data from the Planck satellite and the BICEP2 telescope favor, at around the $2 \sigma$ level, negative running of the spectral index of curvature perturbations from inflation. We show that for negative running $\alpha < 0$, the…
We show the existence of a general mechanism by which heavy scalar fields can be destabilized during inflation, relying on the fact that the curvature of the field space manifold can dominate the stabilizing force from the potential and…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
We present uniform rate inflation in a modified $f(T, \mathcal{T}) $ gravity. It is found that early inflation can be realized even with a scalar field field with a quadratic potential and a negative cosmological constant. We construct…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
We investigate the initiation of cosmic inflation, in full numerical relativity, from pre-inflationary scenarios with large tensor and vector fluctuations in the metric. These settings are characterized by having large values in the Weyl…
We study the dynamics of a scalar field \Phi with the potential g(|\Phi|^2-\eta^2)^2/2 (g=self-coupling constant, \eta=symmetry breaking scale) after inflation and make clear whether topological defects can ever be formed during preheating.…
We propose that under certain conditions the universal open string tachyon can drive topological inflation in moduli stabilised frameworks. Namely, the presence of electric field in the world volume of the D-brane can slow down its decay…
We analyze the core dynamics of critically coupled, superheavy gauge vortices in the (2+1) dimensional Einstein-Abelian-Higgs system. By numerically solving the Eistein and field equations for various values of the symmetry breaking scale,…
We present counter examples to the claim that the $\lambda \phi^4$ inflaton potential is excluded by recent cosmological data. Finding counter examples requires that the actually observed primordial fluctuations are generated at the onset…