Related papers: Adiabatic CMB perturbations in pre-big bang string…
A QCD axion with a time-dependent decay constant has been known to be able to accommodate high-scale inflation without producing topological defects or too large isocurvature perturbations on CMB scales. We point out that a dynamical decay…
There is an apparent power deficit relative to the $\Lambda$CDM prediction of the CMB spectrum at large scales, which, though not yet statistically significant, persists from WMAP to Planck data. Proposals that invoke some form of initial…
Scalar fields in the minimal supersymmetric standard model may have large field values during inflation. Because of approximate global symmetry, it is plausible that the phase directions of them are nearly massless during inflation and…
We compare the latest cosmic microwave background data with theoretical predictions including correlated adiabatic and CDM isocurvature perturbations with a simple power-law dependence. We find that there is a degeneracy between the…
Spectral features in the CMB energy spectrum contain a wealth of information about the physical processes in the early Universe, z < 2 x 10^6. The CMB spectral distortions are complementary to all other probes of cosmology. In fact, most of…
In inflationary cosmology, cosmic reheating after inflation sets the initial conditions for the hot big bang. We investigate how CMB data can be used to study the effective potential and couplings of the inflaton during reheating and…
We analyze a general mechanism for producing a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological curvature perturbations during a contracting phase preceding a big bang, that can be entirely described using 4d effective field theory. The…
We explore the effects of low-scale cosmological first-order phase transitions on Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy and distortion. We examine two scenarios: the distribution of the…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) observations are used to constrain reheating to Standard Model (SM) particles after a period of inflation. As a light spectator field, the SM Higgs boson acquires large field values from its quantum…
Inspired by the string axiverse idea, it has been suggested that the recent transition from decelerated to accelerated cosmic expansion is driven by an axion-like quintessence field with a sub-Planckian decay constant. The scenario requires…
Despite stringent constraints from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations, it is still possible for well-motivated particle physics models to substantially alter the cosmic expansion history…
We investigate the possibility that fields coupled to the inflaton can influence the primordial spectrum of density perturbations through their coherent motion. For example, the second field in hybrid inflation might be oscillating at the…
In D-term inflation models, the fluctuations of squark fields in the flat directions give rise to isocurvature density fluctuations stored in the Affleck-Dine condensate. After the condensate breaks up in B-balls, these can be perturbations…
We consider that the pre-inflation era is radiation-dominated, transiting smoothly to the inflationary era. We work out in detail the dynamics of inflaton fluctuations across the phase transition and the proper choices of initial vacuum…
We investigate the potential of the galaxy power spectrum to constrain compensated isocurvature perturbations (CIPs), primordial fluctuations in the baryon density that are compensated by fluctuations in CDM density to ensure an unperturbed…
We study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies produced by cosine-type quintessence models. In our analysis, effects of the adiabatic and isocurvature fluctuations are both taken into account. For purely adiabatic fluctuations…
Recent Planck data show the anomalies of CMB fluctuations on large angular scales, which confirms the early observations by WMAP. We continue studying an inflationary model, in which before the slow roll inflation the universe is in a…
Primordial decays of string theory moduli at z \sim 10^{12} naturally generate a dark radiation Cosmic Axion Background (CAB) with 0.1 - 1 keV energies. This CAB can be detected through axion-photon conversion in astrophysical magnetic…
The vector perturbations induced on the brane by gravitational waves propagating in the bulk are studied in a cosmological framework. Cosmic expansion arises from the brane motion in a non-compact five-dimensional anti-de Sitter spacetime.…
In pre-big-bang string cosmology one uses a phase of dilaton-driven inflation to stretch an initial (microscopic) spatial patch to the (much larger) size of the big-bang fireball. We show that the dilaton-driven inflationary phase does not…