Related papers: The Cosmological Moduli Problem and Preheating
The Higgs potential appears to be fine-tuned, hence very sensitive to values of other scalar fields that couple to the Higgs. We show that this feature can lead to a new epoch in the early universe featuring violent dynamics coupling the…
Preheating describes the stage of rapidly depositing the energy of cosmological scalar field into excitations of other light fields. This stage is characterized by exponential particle production due to the parametric resonance. We study…
Recently, an interesting class of the direct gauge mediation supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking models are proposed, in which the minimum of the potential of the SUSY breaking field is determined by the inverted hierarchy mechanism. We consider…
We set constraints on moduli cosmology from the production of dark matter -- radiation and baryon -- radiation isocurvature fluctuations through modulus decay, assuming the modulus remains light during inflation. We find that the moduli…
A number of experimental anomalies involving neutrinos hint towards the existence of at least an extra (a very light) sterile neutrino. However, such a species, appreciably mixing with the active neutrinos, is disfavored by different…
We extend the analysis of the recently obtained stringy cosmological solutions induced by thermal and quantum effects, once space-time supersymmetry is spontaneously broken by geometrical fluxes. Cases in which more than one modulus…
Modular cosmology is plagued by overproduction of unwanted relics, gravitinos and especially moduli, at relatively low energy scales. Thermal inflation provides a compelling solution to this moduli problem, but invalidates most baryogenesis…
It was recently pointed out that the fundamental Planck mass could be close to the TeV scale with the observed weakness of gravity at long distances being due the existence of new sub-millimeter spatial dimensions. In this picture the…
We study the details of preheating in Palatini Higgs inflation. We show, that contrary to what happens in the metric formulation of the model, the Universe does not reheat through the creation of gauge bosons only, but also through the…
Considering gravitino dark matter scenarios, we study constraints on the reheating temperature of inflation. We present the gauge-invariant result for the thermally produced gravitino yield to leading order in the Standard Model gauge…
After cosmic inflation and before the transition to radiation domination, the cosmic energy density may have been dominated during an extended period by an oscillating massive scalar condensate. We show that during this period, sub-Hubble…
Winds from pregalactic starbursts and 'miniquasars' may pollute the IGM with metals and raise its temperature to a high adiabat, and so inhibit the formation of early galaxies. We compute the thermal history of the IGM when it experiences a…
Recently, the problem of unitarity violation during the preheating stage of Higgs inflation with a large non-minimal coupling has been much discussed in the literature. We point out that this problem can be translated into a strong coupling…
Dark matter may be coupled to dark radiation: light degrees of freedom that mediate forces between dark sector particles. Cosmological constraints favor dark radiation that is colder than Standard Model radiation. In models with fixed…
We provide a simple but robust argument that primordial black hole (PBH) production generically does {\em not} exceed astrophysical bounds during the resonant preheating phase after inflation. This conclusion is supported by fully nonlinear…
We study preheating in a general class of supersymmetric hybrid inflation model. Supersymmetry leads to only one coupling constant in the potential and thus only one natural frequency of oscillation for the homogeneous fields, whose…
Many compactifications of higher-dimensional supersymmetric theories have approximate vacuum degeneracy. The associated moduli fields are stabilized by non-perturbative effects which break supersymmetry. We show that at finite temperature…
One of the solutions to the cosmological Polonyi problem is to introduce a large coupling between the Polonyi field and the inflaton so that the Polonyi field adiabatically tracks the temporal minimum of the potential. We study general…
It is known that the present electroweak vacuum is likely to be metastable and it may lead to a serious instability during/after inflation. We propose a simple solution to the problem of vacuum instability during/after inflation. If there…
Stable scalars can be copiously produced in the Early Universe even if they have no coupling to other fields. We study production of such scalars during and after (high scale) inflation, and obtain strong constraints on their mass scale.…