Related papers: Can the curvaton paradigm accommodate a low inflat…
Scalar fields in the minimal supersymmetric standard model may have large field values during inflation. Because of approximate global symmetry, it is plausible that the phase directions of them are nearly massless during inflation and…
[Abridged] As is well known, in order to generate magnetic fields of observed amplitudes during inflation, the conformal invariance of the electromagnetic field has to be broken by coupling it either to the inflaton or to the scalar…
We probe the cosmological consequences of a recently proposed class of solutions to the cosmological constant problem. In these models, the universe undergoes a long period of inflation followed by a contraction and a bounce that sets the…
We study models of inflation where the inflaton corresponds to a flat direction in field space and its mass term is generated by gravity mediated soft supersymmetry breaking at high scale. Assuming the inflaton to have non negligible…
We analyze constraints on parameters characterizing the pre-inflating universe in an open inflation model with a present slightly open $\Lambda$CDM universe. We employ an analytic model to show that for a broad class of inflation-generating…
Inflation can occur near a point of inflection in the potential of flat directions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. In this paper we elaborate on the complementarity between the bounds from Cosmic Microwave Background…
The abundance of the QCD axion is known to be suppressed if the Hubble parameter during inflation, $H_{\rm inf}$, is lower than the QCD scale, and if the inflation lasts sufficiently long. We show that the tight upper bound on the inflation…
We demonstrate that the strict upper bounds on the energy scale of inflation and on the tensor-to-scalar ratio can be somewhat relaxed if we assume that - after an initial period of slow rolling when scales probed today in CMB experiments…
We consider slow-roll inflation in the context of recently proposed four-dimensional effective gravity induced on the world-volume of a three-brane in five-dimensional Einstein gravity. We find significant modifications of the simplest…
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…
We consider a supersymmetric grand unified model which naturally solves the strong CP and mu problems via a Peccei-Quinn symmetry and leads to the standard realization of hybrid inflation. We show that the Peccei-Quinn field of this model…
The shift-symmetric coupling of a pseudo-scalar particle driving inflation to gauge fields provides a unique way of probing cosmic inflation. We show for an SU(2) gauge group how a classical isotropic background gauge field develops from…
In these lectures, after a short introduction to cosmology, we discuss the supergravity embedding of higher curvature models of inflation. The supergravity description of such models is presented for the two different formulations of…
Formulae are derived for the spectra of scalar curvature perturbations and gravitational waves produced during inflation, special cases of which include power law inflation, natural inflation in the small angle approximation and inflation…
Erickcek, Kamionkowski and Carroll proposed in 2008 that the dipole modulation of the CMB could be due to a very large scale perturbation of the field $\phi$ causing the primordial curvature perturbation. We repeat their calculation using…
In this talk we will discuss how inflation can be embedded within a minimal extension of the Standard Model where the inflaton carries the Standard Model charges. There is no need of an ad-hoc scalar field to be introduced in order to…
We generalize the scalar-curvature coupling model ${\xi \Phi^2 R}$ of Higgs inflation to $ {\xi \Phi^a R^b} $ to study inflation. We compute the amplitude and spectral index of curvature perturbations generated during inflation and fix the…
We find the best-fit cosmological parameters for a scenario of inflation with only the sufficient amount of accelerated expansion for the $\lambda\phi^4$ potential. While for the simplest scenario of chaotic inflation all observable…
We investigate the effects of couplings between curvature and isocurvature perturbations before and around horizon-crossings during cosmological inflation. We consider a generalized two-field inflation model, in which the non-canonical…
It is usually supposed that inflation is of the slow-roll variety, and that the inflaton generates the primordial curvature perturbation. According to the curvaton hypothesis, inflation need not be slow-roll, and if it is the inflaton…