Related papers: Inflatonless inflation
The notion of inflation (past or present) in standard cosmological models is shown to be a consequence of a sufficiently high second law entropy production from the internal heating of the universal expansion. The longitudinal viscous…
We study the cosmology of a toy modified theory of gravity in which gravity shuts off at short distances, as in the fat graviton scenario of Sundrum. In the weak-field limit, the theory is perturbatively local, ghost-free and unitary,…
We investigate the validity of effective field theory methods and the decoupling of heavy fields during inflation. Considering models of inflation in which the inflaton is coupled to a heavy (super-Hubble) degree of freedom initially in its…
The trace-free version of the Einstein Gravitational equations, essentially equivalent to unimodular gravity, can solve the troubling issue of the huge discrepancy between quantum field theory estimates of the vacuum energy density and the…
We point out that supergravity effects enable the inflaton to decay into all matter fields, including the visible and the supersymmetry breaking sectors, once the inflaton acquires a non-vanishing vacuum expectation value. The new decay…
We show that Inflation in a False Vacuum becomes viable in the presence of a spectator scalar field non minimally coupled to gravity. The field is unstable in this background, it grows exponentially and slows down the pure de Sitter phase…
In this work, we investigate the possibility of generating an inflationary mechanism within the framework of a metric-$f(R)$ modified gravity theory, formulated in the Jordan frame. We explore whether the scalar field, non-minimally coupled…
Cosmological magnetic fields pervade the entire universe, from small to large scales. Since they apparently extend into the intergalactic medium, it is tantalizing to believe that they have a primordial origin, possibly being produced…
Inflation is studied in the context of induced gravity (IG) $\gamma \sigma^2 R$, where $R$ is the Ricci scalar, $\sigma$ a scalar field and $\gamma$ a dimensionless constant, and diverse symmetry-breaking potentials $V(\sigma)$ are…
We propose a derivation of the inflaton scalar potential from the higher $(D)$ dimensional $(R+\gamma R^n-2\Lambda)$ gravity, with the new coupling constant $\gamma$ and the cosmological constant $\Lambda$. We assume that a compactification…
Several major open problems in cosmology, including the nature of inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, share a common structure: they involve spacetime-filling media with unknown microphysics, and can be probed so far only through their…
Gravity can be embedded into a renormalizable theory by means of adding quadratic in curvature terms. However, this at first leads to the presence of the Weyl ghost. It is possible to get rid of this ghost if the locality assumption is…
The induced gravity theory is a variant of Jordan--Brans--Dicke theory where the `dilaton' field possesses a potential. It has the unusual feature that in the presence of a false vacuum there is a {\em stable} static solution with the…
We consider the scale-invariant inflationary model studied in [1]. The Lagrangian includes all the scale-invariant operators that can be built with combinations of $R$, $R^2$ and one scalar field. The equations of motion show that the…
The post-inflationary Universe can pass through a long epoch of effective matter-dominated expansion. This era may allow for both the parametric amplification of initial fluctuations and the gravitational collapse of inflaton perturbations.…
Inflation near a maximum of the potential is studied when non-local derivative operators are included in the inflaton Lagrangian. Such terms can impose additional sources of friction on the field. For an arbitrary spacetime geometry, these…
We discuss a cosmological scenario in which inflation is driven by a potential which is motivated by an effective Lagrangian approach to gravity. We exploit the recent arguments \cite{ARZ} that an effective Lagrangian $L_{eff}$ which, by…
We propose a model for cosmic inflation which is based on an effective description of strongly interacting, nonsupersymmetric matter within the framework of dynamical abelian projection and centerization. The underlying gauge symmetry is…
We consider scalar field inflation in the Palatini formulation of general relativity. The covariant derivative of the metric is then non-zero. From the effective theory point of view it should couple to other fields. We write down the most…
Models of inflation in which the Higgs field is non-minimally coupled to gravity lead, after a recaling of the metric, to a complicated expression for the potential of the inflaton field. Nevertheless, this potential produces the desired…