Related papers: Influence of Super-Horizon Scales on Cosmological …
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…
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…
We study the effect on the primordial cosmological perturbations of a sharp transition from inflationary to a radiation and matter dominated epoch respectively. We assume that the perturbations are generated by the vacuum fluctuations of a…
Inflation produces super-horizon sized perturbations that ultimately return within the horizon and are thought to form the seeds of all observed large scale structure in the Universe. But inflationary predictions can only be compared with…
Previously defined covariant and gauge-invariant perturbation variables, representing, e.g., the fractional spatial energy density gradient on hypersurfaces of constant expansion, are used to simplify the linear perturbation analysis of a…
Cosmological $\alpha$-attractors stand out as particularly compelling models to describe inflation in the very early universe, naturally meeting tight observational bounds from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. We investigate…
We estimate large-scale curvature perturbations from isocurvature fluctuations in the waterfall field during hybrid inflation, in addition to the usual inflaton field perturbations. The tachyonic instability at the end of inflation leads to…
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…
Inflation universally produces classical almost scale free Gaussian inhomogeneities of any light scalars. Assuming the coupling constants at the time of inflation depend on some light moduli fields, we encounter the generation of modulated…
We discuss metric perturbations produced during a period of inflation in the early universe where two scalar fields evolve. The final scalar perturbation spectrum can be calculated in terms of the perturbed expansion along neighbouring…
Cosmological perturbations of massive higher-spin fields are generated during inflation, but they decay on scales larger than the Hubble radius as a consequence of the Higuchi bound. By introducing suitable couplings to the inflaton field,…
I study the gauge-invariant fluctuations of the metric during inflation. In the infrared sector the metric fluctuations can be represented by a coarse-grained field. We can write a Schroedinger equation for the coarse-grained metric…
In this paper we will discuss analytically the perturbations created from a slowly rolling subdominant spectator field which decays much before the end of inflation. The quantum fluctuations of such a spectator field can seed perturbations…
Cosmological inflation is the dominating paradigm to account for observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In this thesis, we study the phenomenology of a class of particularly well motivated models of inflation, known under…
Coupling between sub- and super-Hubble modes can affect the locally observed statistics of our universe. In the context of Quasi-Single Field Inflation, we can compute correlation functions and derive the influence of those unobservable…
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 the amplification of electromagnetic quantum vacuum fluctuations induced by the presence of metric perturbations at the end of inflation. We obtain the amplitude of the corresponding magnetic fields on super-Hubble scales and…
The observational constraints on the primordial power spectrum have tightened considerably with the release of the first year analysis of the WMAP observations, especially when combined with the results from other CMB experiments and galaxy…
Massive particles produced during inflation impact soft limits of primordial correlators. Searching for these signatures presents an exciting opportunity to uncover the particle spectrum in the inflationary epoch. We present…
In most current models of inflation based on a weakly self-coupled scalar matter field minimally coupled to gravity, the period of inflation lasts so long that, at the beginning of the inflationary period, the physical wavelengths of…