Related papers: Can the curvaton paradigm accommodate a low inflat…
Cosmological perturbations, originating in the quantum fluctuations of the fields that drive inflation, are observed to be nearly scale invariant at the largest scales. At smaller scales, however, perturbations are not severely constrained…
The observed power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is consistent with inflationary cosmology, which predicts a nearly scale-invariant power spectrum of quantum fluctuations of the inflaton field as they exit the Hubble…
A recent variant of the inflationary paradigm is that the ``primordial'' curvature perturbations come from quantum fluctuations of a scalar field, subdominant and effectively massless during inflation, called the ``curvaton'', instead of…
We investigate a particular type of curvaton mechanism, under which inflation can occur at Hubble scale of order 1 TeV. The curvaton is a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson, whose order parameter increases after a phase transition during…
Primordial non-Gaussianity signatures of extremely heavy particles are re-examined within a simple alternative to the standard inflationary paradigm, in which the primordial fluctuations and the inflationary spacetime expansion are sourced…
An alternative inflationary model is proposed predicated upon a consideration of the form of the uncertainty principle in a curved background spacetime. An argument is presented suggesting a possible curvature dependence in the correct…
Curvaton is an effectively massless field whose energy density during inflation is negligible but which later becomes dominant. This is a novel mechanism to generate the scale invariant perturbations. I discuss the possibility that the…
The spectrum of curvature perturbation generated during inflation is studied in the case the inflation-driving scalar field (inflaton) $\phi$ crosses over its potential extremum. It is shown that the nondecaying mode of perturbation has a…
We study cosmological perturbations in two-field inflation, allowing for non-standard kinetic terms. We calculate analytically the spectra of curvature and isocurvature modes at Hubble crossing, up to first order in the slow-roll…
Inflation models are compared with observation on the assumption that the curvature perturbation is generated from the vacuum fluctuation of the inflaton field. The focus is on single-field models with canonical kinetic terms, classified as…
It is well known that large Hubble-induced supergravity corrections to the inflaton field can ruin the flatness of the potential, thus creating a tension between slow-roll inflation and supergravity. In this paper we show that it is…
Following the recent Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) results, we consider hilltop inflation where the inflaton is coupled to a curvaton, simultaneously addressing two main challenges faced by conventional hilltop inflation models: the…
We consider the curvaton scenario in the context of supersymmetry (SUSY) with gravity-mediated SUSY breaking. In the case of a large initial curvaton amplitude during inflation and a negative order H^2 correction to the mass squared term…
We investigate two-field inflationary models in which scalar cosmological pertubations are generated via a spectator field nonminimally coupled to gravity, with the particular emphasis on curvaton scenarios. The principal advantage of these…
Adiabatic (curvature) perturbations are produced during a period of cosmological inflation that is driven by a single scalar field, the inflaton. On particle physics grounds -- though -- it is natural to expect that this scalar field is…
We show how observations of the perturbation spectra produced during inflation may be used to constrain the parameters of general scalar-tensor theories of gravity, which include both an inflaton and dilaton field. An interesting feature of…
We propose a new version of the hybrid inflation scenario that produces a significantly tilted n>1 spectrum of curvature perturbations. This may happen in supersymmetric models where the inflaton field acquires a mass proportional to the…
We investigate a particle physics model for cosmic inflation based on the following assumptions: (i) there are at least two complex scalar fields; (ii) the scalar potential is bounded from below and remains perturbative up to the Planck…
Most models of inflation have small parameters, either to guarantee sufficient inflation or the correct magnitude of the density perturbations. In this paper we show that, in supersymmetric theories with weak scale supersymmetry breaking,…
We show how to build a curvaton inflationary model motivated by scale-dependent non-Gaussianities of cosmological perturbations. In particular, we study the change of sign in the $f_{NL}$ parameter as a function of the curvaton field value…