Related papers: Topological Curvatons
A (very) brief review of topological defects and their possible cosmic roles. I emphasize in particular that superheavy defects needed for structure formation can peacefully coexist with inflation, despite the claims to the contrary which…
It is tempting to inflate along one of the many flat directions that arise in supersymmetric theories. The required flatness of the potential to obtain sufficient inflation and to not overproduce density fluctuations occurs naturally.…
Structure formation with topological defects is described. The main differences from inflationary models are highlighted. The results are compared with recent observations. It is concluded that all the defect models studied so far are in…
We present a mechanism for the origin of the large-scale curvature perturbation in our Universe by the late decay of a massive scalar field, the curvaton. The curvaton is light during a period of cosmological inflation, when it acquires a…
The particle production process is reviewed, through which cosmic inflation can produce a scale invariant superhorizon spectrum of perturbations of suitable fields starting from their quantum fluctuations. Afterwards, in the context of the…
Topological defects can naturally be formed soon after bubble nucleation in the open inflation scenario. The defects are not completely diluted away by the subsequent period of inflation in the bubble interior and can produce observable…
Topological defects can be formed during inflation by phase transitions as well as by quantum nucleation. We study the effect of the expansion of the Universe on the internal structure of the defects. We look for stationary solutions to the…
The curvaton scenario for the generation of the cosmological curvature perturbation on large scales represents an alternative to the standard slow-roll scenario of inflation in which the observed density perturbations are due to…
A wide class of inflationary models, known as Hybrid Inflation models, may produce topological defects during a phase transition at the end of the inflationary epoch. We point out that, if the energy scale of these defects is close to that…
Hybrid inflation within supersymmetric grand unified theories, as well as inflation through brane collisions within braneworld cosmological models, lead to the formation of one-dimensional defects. Observational data, mainly from the cosmic…
I present a briefly summary of the current status of inflationary models versus topological defects scenarios, as the mechanisms which could have induced the initial density perturbations, which left an imprint on the cosmic microwave…
We discuss relationship between inflation and various models of production of density inhomogeneities due to strings, global monopoles, textures and other topological and non-topological defects. Neither of these models leads to a…
Topological defects are produced during phase transitions in the very early Universe. They arise in most unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions. These lectures focus on the role of topological defects in…
We describe new scenarios of generating curvature perturbations when inflaton (curvaton) has significant interactions. We consider a ``spot'', which arises from interactions associated with enhanced symmetric point (ESP) on the trajectory.…
In an inflationary cosmology, the observed primoridal density perturbation could come from the quantum fluctuations of another light 'curvaton' field, rather than the inflaton. In this case, it is essential that the curvaton decays,…
We consider a novel cosmological scenario in which a curvaton is long-lived and plays the role of cold dark matter (CDM) in the presence of a short, secondary inflation. Non-trivial evolution of the large scale cosmological perturbation in…
We present a new general mechanism to generate curvature perturbations after the end of the slow-roll phase of inflation. Our model is based on the simple assumption that the potential driving inflation is characterized by an underlying…
Topological defects, in particular cosmic strings, give rise to an interesting mechanism for generating the primordial perturbations in the early Universe which are required to explain the present structure. An overview of the cosmic string…
In the context of supersymmetric models, we analyze the production of topological defects at the end of inflation driven by a conjugate pair of inflaton fields which are non-singlets under the continuous symmetry group of the theory. We…
We propose a new mechanism to generate density perturbations in inflationary models. Spatial fluctuations in the decay rate of the inflaton field to ordinary matter lead to fluctuations in the reheating temperature. We argue that in most…