Related papers: Initial state effects on the cosmic microwave back…
We consider an ultra-light scalar field with a mass comparable to (or lighter than) the Hubble parameter of the present universe, and calculate the time evolution of the energy-momentum tensor of the vacuum fluctuations generated during and…
We explore a model of the early universe in which the inflationary epoch is preceded by a cosmic bounce, and argue that this scenario provides a common origin to several of the anomalous features that have been observed at large angular…
The latest results from PLANCK impose strong constraints on features in the spectrum of the curvature perturbations from inflation. We analyse the possibility of particle production induced by sharp turns of the trajectory in field space in…
We compute the rate with which super-Hubble cosmological fluctuations are decohered during inflation, by their gravitational interactions with unobserved shorter-wavelength scalar and tensor modes. We do so using Open Effective Field Theory…
The power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from both the Planck and WMAP data exhibits a slight dip in for multipoles in the range of l=10-30. We show that such a dip could be the result of resonant creation of a massive particle…
The (large-scale) structures we observe in the Universe are classical, but within the inflationary scenario they do originate from quantum fluctuations. This leads to the question: ''How did this quantum-to-classical transition occur?''. A…
A continuous process of creation of particles is investigated as a possible connection between the inflationary stage with late cosmic acceleration. In this model, the inflationary era occurs due to a continuous and fast process of creation…
The cosmological curvature perturbation may be generated when some `curvaton' field, different from the inflaton, oscillates in a background of unperturbed radiation. In its simplest form the curvaton paradigm requires the Hubble parameter…
Standard cosmology poses a number of important questions. Apart from its singular origin, it possesses early and late accelerating phases required to account for observations. The vacuum energy has been considered as a possible way to…
During eternal inflation, a landscape of vacua can be populated by the nucleation of bubbles. These bubbles inevitably collide, and collisions sometimes displace the field into a new minimum in a process known as a classical transition. In…
We study the effects of the trans-Planckian dispersion relation on the spectrum of the primordial density perturbations during inflation. In contrast to the earlier analyses, we do not assume any specific form of the dispersion relation and…
We derive a general expression for the power spectra of scalar and tensor fluctuations generated during inflation given an arbitrary choice of boundary condition for the mode function at a short distance. We assume that the boundary…
In this paper we put forward the idea that the comoving Hubble horizon undergoes multiple stages of contraction (a.k.a. inflationary phase) and expansion. The observable inflation, that produces the CMB anisotropies and generates primordial…
A formula for the power spectrum of curvature perturbations having any initial conditions in inflation is obtained. Based on the physical conditions before inflation, the possibility exists that the initial state of scalar perturbations is…
Rotational invariance is a well-established feature of low-energy physics. Violations of this symmetry must be extremely small today, but could have been larger in earlier epochs. In this paper we examine the consequences of a small…
We study the entire coupled evolution of the inflaton and the scale factor for general initial conditions at a given initial time. The generic early universe evolution has three stages: decelerated fast-roll followed by inflationary fast…
It is investigated if predictions of the inflationary scenario regarding spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations generated from quantum vacuum fluctuations are robust with respect to a modification of the dispersion law for frequencies…
In order to go beyond the mean-field approximation, commonly used in the inflationary computations, an identification of the quantum constituents of the inflationary background is made. In particular, the homogeneous scalar field…
We present cosmological constraints from Planck 2015 data for a universe that is kinetically dominated at very early times. We perform a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis to estimate parameters and use nested sampling to determine the…
We show how a radiation dominated universe subject to space-time quantization may give rise to inflation as the radiation temperature exceeds the Planck temperature. We consider dispersion relations with a maximal momentum (i.e. a mimimum…