Related papers: Hilltop Inflation
The recent BICEP2 report on the CMB B-mode polarization hints an early Universe energy density at the GUT scale. We add a new 'chaoton' term to our recently proposed hilltop potential to have a large tensor mode fluctuation. The chaoton…
We briefly review several Higgs inflation models and discuss their cosmological implications. We first classify the inflation models according to the predicted value of the tensor-to-scalar ratio: (i) $r = {\cal O}(0.01-0.1)$, (ii) $r =…
Many authors claimed that a large initial inhomogeneity prevents the onset of inflation and therefore inflation takes place only if the scalar field is homogeneous or appropriately chosen over the horizon scale. We show that those arguments…
If the inflationary era is preceded by a radiation dominated era in which the inflaton too was in thermal equilibrium at some very early time then the CMB data places an upper bound on the comoving temperature of the (decoupled) inflaton…
In the primordial universe, fields with mass much larger than the mass-scale of the event-horizon (such as the Hubble parameter in inflation) exist ubiquitously, and can be excited from time to time and oscillate quickly around their…
Dynamical models of inflation are given with composite inflatons by means of massive supersymmetric gauge theory. Nearly flat directions and stable massive ones in the potential are identified and slow-roll during inflation is examined.…
In the Standard Model, the Higgs potential develops an instability at high field values when the quartic self-coupling runs negative. Large quantum fluctuations during cosmic inflation could drive the Higgs field beyond the potential…
Recently we have studied in great detail a model of Hybrid Natural Inflation (HNI) by constructing two simple effective field theories. These two versions of the model allow inflationary energy scales as small as the electroweak scale in…
We have recently suggested [1,2] that Inflation could have started in a local minimum of the Higgs potential at field values of about $10^{15}-10^{17}$ GeV, which exists for a narrow band of values of the top quark and Higgs masses and thus…
We consider trapped inflation in a higher dimensional field space: particle production at a dense distribution of extra species points leads to a terminal velocity at which inflation can be driven in steep potentials. We compute an…
Inflation is known to be generically eternal to the future: the false vacuum is thermalized in some regions of space, while inflation continues in other regions. Here, we address the question of whether inflation can also be eternal to the…
We discuss the issue of setting appropriate initial conditions for inflation. Specifically, we consider natural inflation model and discuss the fine tuning required for setting almost homogeneous initial conditions over a region of order…
We consider the possibility of primordial black hole, PBH, formation sourced by a rise in the power spectrum. The power spectrum becomes large at late times due to decay of the inflaton into vectors through a $\phi F \tilde{F}$ coupling.…
In this paper we will analyze generic predictions of an inflection-point model of inflation with Hubble-induced corrections and study them in light of the Planck data. Typically inflection-point models of inflation can be embedded within…
It is likely that the Higgs potential of the Standard Model is unstable, turning negative at $\phi < \Lambda \sim 10^{10}$ GeV. Here we consider whether it is possible to have Higgs Inflation on the positive stable region of the potential…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
We consider an inflationary universe scenario with multiple stages of inflation. The primary inflation, which may start at the Planck epoch, is followed by secondary inflations, which include the cosmological inflation that causes the…
We consider higher-dimensional uniform inflation, in which the extra dimensions expand at the same rate as three-dimensional non-compact space during inflation. We compute the cosmological perturbation in $D+4$ dimensions and derive the…
We propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
The pre-big bang scenario describes the evolution of the Universe from an initial state approaching the flat, cold, empty, string perturbative vacuum. The choice of such an initial state is suggested by the present state of our Universe if…