Related papers: Supersymmetry and Inflation
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
Swampland conjectures have attracted quite some interest in the cosmological community. They have been shown to have wide ranging implications , like constraints on inflationary models, primordial black holes, dark energy to name a few.…
The scale at which supersymmetry is broken and the mechanism by which supersymmetry breaking is fed down to the observable sector has rich implications on the way Nature may have chosen to accomplish inflation. We discuss a simple model for…
Cosmic inflation is arguably the most favoured paradigm of the very early Universe. It postulates an early phase of fast, nearly exponential, and accelerated expansion. Inflationary models are capable of explaining the overall flatness and…
Most high-energy constructions that realise a phase of cosmic inflation contain many degrees of freedom. Yet, cosmological observations are all consistent with single-field embeddings. We show how volume selection effects explain this…
Inflationary models are generally credited with explaining the large scale homogeneity, isotropy, and flatness of our universe as well as accounting for the origin of structure (i.e., the deviations from exact homogeneity) in our universe.…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
The simplicity of the CMB data, so well described by single-field inflation, raises the question whether there might be an equally simple multi-field realization consistent with the observations. We explore the idea that an approximate…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
We consider supersymmetric inflation models in which inflation occurs at an intermediate scale and which provide a solution to the $\mu$ problem and the strong CP problem. Such models are particularly attractive since inflation,…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
Natural (axionic) inflation provides a well-motivated and predictive scheme for the description of the early universe. It leads to sizeable primordial tensor modes and thus a high mass scale of the inflationary potential. Naively this seems…
Despite the fact that experimentally with a high degree of statistical significance only a single Standard Model--like Higgs boson is discovered at the LHC, extended Higgs sectors with multiple scalar fields not excluded by combined fits of…
A model of cosmological inflation is proposed in which field space is a hyperbolic plane. The inflaton never slow-rolls, and instead orbits the bottom of the potential, buoyed by a centrifugal force. Though initial velocities redshift away…
Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…
Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…
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.…
Forthcoming missions probing the absolute intensity of the CMB are expected to be able to measure spectral distortions, which are deviations from its blackbody distribution. As cosmic inflation can induce spectral distortions, these…
Inflation has been the driving idea in cosmology for two decades and is a pillar of the New Cosmology. The inflationary paradigm has now passed its first round of significant tests, with two of its three basics predictions confirmed at…
We develop a supersymmetric bi-axion model of high-scale inflation coupled to supergravity, in which the axionic structure originates from, and is protected by, gauge symmetry in an extra dimension. While local supersymmetry (SUSY) is…