Related papers: Initial condition for new inflation in supergravit…
We examine the inflationary modes in the cubic curvature theories in the context of asymptotically safe gravity. On the phase space of the Hubble parameter, there exists a critical point which corresponds to the slow-roll inflation in…
We study a double inflation model (a preinflation + a new inflation) in supergravity and discuss the formation of primordial black holes which may be identified with massive compact halo objects (MACHOs) observed in the halo of our galaxy.…
Studies of the initial conditions for inflation have conflicting predictions from exponential suppression to inevitability. At the level of phase space, this conflict arises from the competing intuitions of CPT invariance and…
In the context of the Higgs model involving gauge and Yukawa interactions with the spontaneous gauge symmetry breaking, we consider $\lambda \phi^4$ inflation with non-minimal gravitational coupling, where the Higgs field is identified as…
We propose a simple but effective mechanism to realize an inflationary early universe consistent with the observed WMAP, Planck and/or BICEP2 data, which would be incorporated in various supersymmetric models of elementary particles…
In F-term supergravity inflation models, scalar fields other than the inflaton generically receive a Hubble induced mass, which may restore gauge symmetries during inflation and phase transitions may occur during or after inflation as the…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
The curvaton and the inhomogeneous reheating scenarios for the generation of the cosmological curvature perturbation on large scales represent an alternative to the standard slow-roll scenario where the observed density perturbations are…
Inflation may have been driven by a component which violated the Null-Energy Condition, thereby leading to {\it super inflation}. We provide the formalism to study cosmological perturbations when such a component is described by a scalar…
We examine the class of initial conditions which give rise to inflation. Our analysis is carried out for several popular models including: Higgs inflation, Starobinsky inflation, chaotic inflation, axion monodromy inflation and…
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…
The entropy of the observable universe is increasing. Thus, at earlier times the entropy was lower. However, the cosmic microwave background radiation reveals an apparently high entropy universe close to thermal and chemical equilibrium. A…
While ubiquitous in supersymmetric and string theory models, inflationary scenarios near an inflection point in the scalar potential generically require a severe fine-tuning of a priori unrelated supersymmetry breaking effects. We show that…
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…
We consider the conditions for the decay products of perturbative inflaton decay to thermalize. The importance of considering the full spectrum of inflaton decay products in the thermalization process is emphasized. It is shown that the…
Some recent studies based on numerical relativity simulations claim that slow contraction/ekpyrosis is strongly preferred over inflation as the smoothing mechanism that brought the universe into the homogeneous, isotropic and flat state we…
Trapped inflation is a mechanism in which particle production from the moving inflaton is the main source of friction in the inflaton equation of motion. The produced fields source inflaton perturbations, which dominate over the vacuum…
We propose a mechanism for generating an inflationary phase in the early universe without resorting to any type of scalar field(s). Instead, this accelerated expansion is driven by a dynamical "cosmological constant" in the framework of…
We study a double inflation model (a hybrid inflation + a new inflation) in supergravity and discuss the formation of primordial black holes (PBHs) with mass \sim 10^{-20}-10^{5}M_{\odot}. We find that in a wide range of parameter space, we…
Inflation is a promising solution to many problems of the standard Big-Bang cosmology. Nevertheless, inflationary models have proved less compelling. In this chapter, we discuss why supersymmetry has led to more natural models of inflation.…