Related papers: Power Spectrum and Signatures for Cascade Inflatio…
We derive inflation from M-theory on S^1/Z_2 via the non-perturbative dynamics of N M5-branes. The open membrane instanton interactions between the M5-branes give rise to exponential potentials which are too steep for inflation individually…
The inflaton field responsible for inflation may not be a canonical fundamental scalar. It is possible that the inflaton is a composite of fermions or it may have a decay width. In these cases the standard procedure for calculating the…
In cascade inflation and some other string inflation models, collisions of mobile branes with other branes or orbifold planes occur and lead to interesting cosmological signatures. The fundamental M/string-theory description of these…
Inflection point inflation generically includes a deviation from slow-roll when the inflaton approaches the inflection point. Such deviations are shown to be generated by transitions between singular trajectories. The effects on the power…
We propose an inflationary scenario, M-flation, in which inflation is driven by three $N\times N$ hermitian matrices $\Phi_i, i=1,2,3$. The inflation potential of our model, which is strongly motivated from string theory, is constructed…
Prior to recombination, Silk damping causes the dissipation of energy from acoustic waves into the monopole of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), resulting in spectral distortions. These can be used to probe the primordial scalar power…
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…
We investigate inflationary scenarios driven by a class of potentials which are similar in form to those that arise in certain minimal supersymmetric extensions of the standard model. We find that these potentials allow a brief period of…
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…
Power suppression of the cosmic microwave background on the largest observable scales could provide valuable clues about the particle physics underlying inflation. Here we consider the prospect of power suppression in the context of the…
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…
It is shown that multi M5-brane inflation in heterotic M-theory gives rise to a detectable gravitational wave power spectrum with tensor fraction $r$ typically larger than the projected experimental sensitivity, $r_{exp} = 0.01$. A…
We explore the possibility of obtaining inflation in weakly coupled heterotic string theory, where the model dependent axions are responsible for driving inflation. This model can be considered as a certain extrapolation of…
We investigate the inflationary expansion of the universe induced by higher curvature corrections in M-theory. The inflationary evolution of the geometry is discussed in ref.[1], thus we succeed to analyse metric perturbations around the…
We show that brane inflation is very sensitive to tiny sharp features in extra dimensions, including those in the potential and in the warp factor. This can show up as observational signatures in the power spectrum and/or non-Gaussianities…
String/M theory inspires an uncertainty relation between space and time which deviates from general relativity. It is possible to explore this deviation from cosmological observations, in particular from the CMB fluctuation spectrum. This…
In the ``natural inflation'' model, the inflaton potential is periodic. We show that Planck scale physics may induce corrections to the inflaton potential, which is also periodic with a greater frequency. Such high frequency corrections…
Chain Inflation is an alternative to slow roll inflation in which the universe undergoes a series of transitions between different vacua. The density perturbations (studied in this paper) are seeded by the probabilistic nature of tunneling…
In a recent paper, we suggested that the density fluctuation spectra arising from power-law (or extended) inflation, which are tilted with respect to the Harrison--Zel'dovich spectrum, may provide an explanation for the excess large scale…
In this paper we break the scale invariance of the primordial power spectrum of curvature perturbations of inflation. Introducing a singular behaviour due to spontaneous symmetry breaking in the inflaton potential, we obtain fully analytic…