Related papers: Ghost Inflation
The incorporation of bulk viscosity process to General Relativity leads to the appearance of nonsingular backgrounds that, at early and late times, depict an accelerated universe. These backgrounds could be analytically calculated and…
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…
The standard inflationary theory focuses on the freezing of super-horizon fluctuations, which generate a scale-invariant spectrum, while the sub-horizon modes are expected to remain in thermal equilibrium. Building upon recent development…
Using the techniques of out-of-equilibrium field theory, we study the influence on the properties of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation on observable scales coming from fluctuations corresponding today to scales much…
We study primordial perturbations from hyperinflation, proposed recently and based on a hyperbolic field-space. In the previous work, it was shown that the field-space angular momentum supported by the negative curvature modifies the…
The recently suggested generalized unimodular gravity theory, which was originally put forward as a model of dark energy, can serve as a model of cosmological inflation driven by the effective perfect fluid -- the dark purely gravitational…
We perform a model-independent analysis of kinetically driven inflation (KDI) which (partially) includes Generalized G-inflation and Ghost inflation. We evaluate the background evolution splitting into the inflationary attractor and the…
The scale--independence of the primordial curvature perturbation suggests that it comes from the vacuum fluctuation during inflation of a light scalar field. This field may be the inflaton, or a different `curvaton' field. The observation…
We propose a model for early universe cosmology without the need for fundamental scalar fields. Cosmic acceleration and phenomenologically viable reheating of the universe results from a series of energy transitions, where during each…
It is shown that the de Sitter state is invariant with respect to Wick rotation. In imaginary time, super- horizon quantum and classical metric fluctuations of the empty FLRW space (with no matter fields) form a self-consistent de Sitter…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…
We demonstrate that in the presence of a light scalar spectator field, vacuum transitions taking place during inflation can produce large, potentially detectable non-Gaussian signatures in the primordial curvature perturbation. Such…
We investigate the possibility that the inflationary period in the early universe was preceded by a primordial stage of strong anisotropy. In particular we focus on the simplest model of this kind, where the spacetime is described by a…
Slow-roll inflation generically makes several predictions: a flat Universe, primordial adiabatic density perturbations, and a stochastic gravity-wave background. Each inflation model will further predict specific relations between the…
A semi-classical analysis of vacuum energy in the expanding spacetime suggests that the cosmological term decays with time, with a concomitant matter production. For early times we find, in Planck units, $\Lambda \approx H^4$, where H is…
Inflationary cosmology provides a natural mechanism for the generation of primordial perturbations which seed the formation of observed cosmic structure and lead to specific signals of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background…
Following inflation, the Universe may pass through an early matter-dominated phase supported by the oscillating inflaton condensate. Initially small fluctuations in the condensate grow gravitationally on subhorizon scales and can collapse…
We develop a non-perturbative formalism for scalar metric fluctuations from a 5D extended version of general relativity in vacuum. In this work we concentrate our efforts on calculations valid on large cosmological scales, which are the…
We study the cosmology of a toy modified theory of gravity in which gravity shuts off at short distances, as in the fat graviton scenario of Sundrum. In the weak-field limit, the theory is perturbatively local, ghost-free and unitary,…