Related papers: Some Connections between Quantum Tunneling and Inf…
In generic models of cosmological inflation, quantum fluctuations strongly influence the spacetime metric and produce infinitely many regions where the end of inflation (reheating) is delayed until arbitrarily late times. The geometry of…
We study inflation in scalar-tensor perturbative quantum gravity driven by a one-loop effective potential. We consider effective potentials generated by three models. The first model describes a single scalar field with a non-vanishing…
We investigate models in which inflation is driven by an ultraviolet safe and interacting scalar sector stemming from a new class of nonsupersymmetric gauge field theories. These new theories, differently from generic scalar models, are…
A new family of inflation models is introduced and studied. The models are characterised by a scalar potential which, far from the origin, approximates an inflationary plateau, while near the origin becomes monomial, as in chaotic…
In this paper we investigate a model of an inflationary universe in Kaluza-Klein theory, which is a four-dimensional de Sitter space plus a one-dimensional compactified internal space. We find that the energy scale for inflation can be…
The tunneling probability for a system modelling macroscopic quantum tunneling is computed. We consider an open quantum system with one degree of freedom consisting of a particle trapped in a cubic potential interacting with an environment…
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…
It is a longstanding desire of cosmologists, and particle physicists as well, to connect inflation to low energy physics, culminating, for instance, in what is known as Higgs inflation. The condition for the standard Higgs boson playing the…
An approach to compute quantum-gravity corrections to the scalar and tensorial power spectra of the inflationary perturbations is presented. The analysis of the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is performed by a decomposition of the wave function…
A field kinetic coupling with the Einstein tensor leads to a gravitationally enhanced friction during inflation, by which even steep potentials with theoretically natural model parameters can drive cosmic acceleration. In the presence of…
We have explicitly demonstrated that scalar coupled Gauss-Bonnet gravity in four dimension can have non-trivial effects on the early inflationary stage of our universe. In particular, we have shown that the scalar coupled Gauss-Bonnet term…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…
In these lectures, after a short introduction to cosmology, we discuss the supergravity embedding of higher curvature models of inflation. The supergravity description of such models is presented for the two different formulations of…
We present Euclidean wormhole solutions describing possible bridges within the multiverse. The study is carried out in the framework of the third quantization. The matter content is modelled through a scalar field which supports the…
Theories with elementary scalar degrees of freedom seem nowadays required for simple descriptions of the Standard Model and of the Early Universe. It is then natural to embed theories of inflation in supergravity, also in view of their…
We propose a model of inflation with a suitable potential for a single scalar field which falls in the wide class of hilltop inflation. We derive the analytical expressions for most of the physical quantities related to inflation and show…
In the present paper we discuss how trans-Planckian physics affects inflationary vacuum fluctuations and primordial density perturbations. The trans-Planckian problem during inflation has been widely discussed in literature, but it is still…
We study viable small-field Coleman-Weinberg (CW) inflation models with the help of non-minimal coupling to gravity. The simplest small-field CW inflation model (with a low-scale potential minimum) is incompatible with the cosmological…
We suggest a path integral formulation for the tunneling cosmological state, which admits a consistent renormalization and renormalization group (RG) improvement in particle physics applications of quantum cosmology. We apply this…
We study quantum gravity constraints on inflationary model building. Our approach is based on requiring the entropy associated to a given inflationary model to be less than that of the de Sitter entropy. We give two prescriptions for…