Related papers: Stochastic Quantum Gravitational Inflation
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. Starobinski\u{\i}'s…
The continual production of long wavelength gravitons during primordial inflation endows graviton loop corrections with secular growth factors. During a prolonged period of inflation these factors eventually overwhelm the small…
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…
It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…
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…
Stochastic inflation is an effective theory describing the super-Hubble, coarse-grained, scalar fields driving inflation, by a set of Langevin equations. We previously highlighted the difficulty of deriving a theory of stochastic inflation…
We study the stochastic formalism of inflation beyond the usual slow-roll approximation. We verify that the assumptions on which the stochastic formalism relies still hold even far from the slow-roll attractor. This includes demonstrating…
The continual production of gravitons during inflation endows loop corrections with secular logarithms which grow nonperturbatively large during a prolonged period of inflation. The physics behind these effects is reviewed, along with a…
In inflationary cosmological models driven by an inflaton field the origin of the primordial inhomogeneities which are responsible for large scale structure formation are the quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field. These are usually…
Stochastic semiclassical gravity is a theory for the interaction of gravity with quantum matter fields which goes beyond the semiclassical limit. The theory predicts stochastic fluctuations of the classical gravitational field induced by…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
While moving down the potential on its classical slow roll trajectory, the inflaton field is subject to quantum jumps, which take it up or down the potential at random. In "stochastic inflation", the impact of these quantum jumps is modeled…
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…
A perturbative method for solving the Langevin equation of inflationary cosmology in presence of backreaction is presented. In the Gaussian approximation, the method permits an explicit calculation of the probability distribution of the…
Certain models of cosmic inflation produce strong cosmological perturbations at short length scales, which may later collapse into primordial black holes. To find the statistics of these strong perturbations and the ensuing black holes, it…
The perturbative approach to stochastic inflation is used to determine the spectrum of density fluctuations and gravitational waves due to the coarse grained field. The amplitude of the curvature fluctuation spectrum, the spectral index and…
We study chaotic inflation driven by a real, massive, homogeneous minimally coupled scalar field in a flat Robertson-Walker spacetime. The semiclassical limit for gravity is considered, whereas the scalar field is treated quantum…
In this paper we develop the formalism for the stochastic approach to inflation at all order in slow-roll parameters. This is done by including the momentum and Hamiltonian constraints into the stochastic equations. We then specialise to…
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…
We review some perturbative results obtained in quantum gravity in an accelerating cosmological background. We then describe a class of non-local, purely gravitational models which have the correct structure to reproduce the leading…