Related papers: Stringy Effects During Inflation and Reheating
The lack of power on large scales (l < 40) might have been observed by the PLANCK satellite. We argue that this putative feature can be explained by a phase of fast roll at the onset of inflation. We show that in the context of single field…
Reheating is the the epoch which connects inflation to the subsequent hot Big-Bang phase. Conceptually very important, this era is however observationally poorly known. We show that the current Planck satellite measurements of the Cosmic…
I elaborate on a link between the string--scale breaking of supersymmetry that occurs in a class of superstring models and the onset of inflation. The link rests on spatially flat cosmologies supported by a scalar field driven by an…
We present a model for quintessential inflation using a string modulus for the inflaton - quintessence field. The scalar potential of our model is based on generic non-perturbative potentials arising in flux compactifications. We assume an…
We examine the effects of cosmic strings on structure formation and on the ionization history of the universe. While Gaussian perturbations from inflation are known to provide the dominant contribution to the large scale structure of the…
It has been argued that rather generic features of string-inspired inflationary theories with low-energy supersymmetry (SUSY) make it difficult to achieve inflation with a Hubble scale H > m_{3/2}, where m_{3/2} is the gravitino mass in the…
Models of inflation in a gravitational background with an anisotropic space-time scaling are studied. The background is a higher-dimensional Lifshitz throat with the anisotropy scaling $z\neq 1$. After the dimensional reduction, the…
Two extensions of ideas lying in the basis of the inflationary scenario of the early Universe and their effect on the large scale structure of the present-day Universe are discussed. The first of them is the possibility of fast phase…
We revisit the hybrid inflation model gauged by $U(1)_{B-L}$ extension of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) in a no-scale background. Considering a single predictive framework, we study inflation, leptogenesis, gavitino…
The eta problem is one of the most significant obstacles to building a successful inflationary model in string theory. Planck mass suppressed corrections to the inflaton potential generally lead to inflaton masses of order the Hubble scale…
The recent measurements of cosmological parameters by the Planck collaboration favors inflationary models with a redshifted spectrum and a very low tensor-to-scalar ratio. Two well-studied scenarios in the particle physics/string theory…
We assess two potential signals of the formation of our universe by the decay of a false vacuum. Negative spatial curvature is one possibility, but the window for its detection is now small. However, another possible signal is a suppression…
We reanalyze brane inflation with brane-brane interactions at an angle, which include the special case of brane-anti-brane interaction. If nature is described by a stringy realization of the brane world scenario today (with arbitrary…
We show that a moduli space of the form predicted by string theory, lifted by supersymmetry breaking, gives rise to successful inflation for large regions of parameter space without any modification or fine tuning. This natural realization…
Super--inflation driven by dilaton/moduli kinetic energy is naturally realized in compactified string theory. Discussed are selected topics of recent development in string inflationary cosmology: kinematics of super-inflation, graceful exit…
Overall, brane inflation is compatible with the recent analysis of the WMAP data. Here we explore the constraints of WMAP and 2dFGRS data on the various brane inflationary scenarios. Brane inflation naturally ends with the production of…
Quintessential inflation is studied using a string modulus as the inflaton - quintessence field. It is assumed that the modulus crosses an enhanced symmetry point (ESP) in field space. Particle production at the ESP temporarily traps the…
These notes present a brief introduction to Hot Big Bang cosmology and Cosmic Inflation, together with a selection of some recent attempts to embed inflation into string theory. They provide a partial description of lectures presented in…
It was pointed out that brane-anti-brane inflation without warped geometry is not viable due to compactification effects (in the simplified scenario where the inflaton is decoupled from the compactification moduli). We show that the…
The epochs of reheating and preheating are studied in a simple extension of the Starobinsky inflationary model, which consists of an $R^2$--correction to the Einstein--Hilbert action and an additional scalar field. We find that if the…