Related papers: COBE, Inflation, and Light Scalars
One of the major predictions of inflation is the existence of a stochastic background of cosmological gravitational waves (GW). These gravitational waves can induce significant temperature anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background…
Probing correlations among short and long-wavelength cosmological fluctuations is known to be decisive for deepening the current understanding of inflation at the microphysical level. Spectral distortions of the CMB can be caused by…
We develop a scenario of inflation with spontaneously broken time and space diffeomorphisms, with distinctive features for the primordial tensor modes. Inflationary tensor fluctuations are non adiabatic, and can acquire a mass during the…
We revisit alternative mechanisms of gravitational wave production during inflation and argue that they generically emit a non-negligible amount of scalar fluctuations. We find the scalar power is larger than the tensor power by a factor of…
The first year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data favors primordial adiabatic fluctuation with a running spectral index with $\ns >1$ on a large scale and $\ns <1$ on a smaller scale. The model building of inflation that predicts…
We present the results of a detailed study of how isocurvature axion fluctuations are converted into adiabatic metric perturbations through axion decay, and discuss the constraints on the parameters of pre-big bang cosmology needed for…
We identify a new mechanism in supergravity theories which leads to successful inflation without any need for fine tuning. The simplest model yields a spectrum of density fluctuations tilted away from scale-invariance and negligible…
In solid inflation the single field non-Gaussianity consistency condition is violated. As a result, the long tensor perturbation induces observable clustering fossils in the form of quardupole anisotropy in large scale structure power…
The original axion natural inflation model predicts a tensor-to-scalar ratio exceeding experimental limits. Conversely, in aligned axion inflation, inflation can proceed along trajectories emerging from near a saddle point of the two-field…
Light scalar fields acquire isocurvature fluctuations during inflation. While these fluctuations could lead to interesting observable signatures at small scales, they are strongly constrained on large scales by cosmic microwave background…
We study a model of inflation where the scalar perturbations are almost gaussian while there is sizable (equilateral) nongaussianity in the tensor sector. In this model, a rolling pseudoscalar gravitationally coupled to the inflaton…
The ekpyrotic slow contraction or the slow expansion might be responsible for the adiabatical production of the nearly scale invariant curvature perturbation. However, the tensor perturbation generated is generally strongly blue, which…
We study the inflationary gravitational wave background induced by Abelian gauge fields generated by non-minimal kinetic and axial couplings to the inflaton. We show that, up to slow-roll corrections, for coupling functions that share the…
Primordial statistical anisotropy is a key indicator to investigate early Universe models and has been probed by the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. In this paper, we examine tensor-mode CMB fluctuations generated from…
In the context of the open inflationary universe, we calculate the amplitude of quantum fluctuations which deform the bubble shape. These give rise to scalar field fluctuations in the open Friedman-Robertson-Walker universe which is…
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
Power spectra always play an important role in the theory of inflation. In particular, the ability to reproduce the galaxy matter power spectrum and the CMB temperature angular power spectrum coefficients to high accuracy is often…
A first-order phase transition in the early universe can give an observable stochastic gravitational background (SGWB), which will necessarily have primordial anisotropies across the sky. In multi-field inflationary scenarios, these…
The motion of a pseudo-scalar field $X$ during inflation naturally induces a significant amplification of the gauge fields to which it is coupled. The amplified gauge fields can source characteristic scalar and tensor primordial…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…