Related papers: Power Spectrum and Signatures for Cascade Inflatio…
Assuming that inflation happened through a series of tunneling in the string theory landscape, it is argued that one can determine the structure of vacua using precise measurements of the scalar spectral index and tensor perturbations at…
We study scale dependence of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum in a class of small, single-field models of inflation which lead to a high value of the tensor to scalar ratio. The inflaton potentials that we consider are…
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 have developed a formalism to study an inflationary scenario driven by a bulk inflaton in the two-brane system. The 4-dimensional low energy effective action is obtained using the gradient expansion method. It is also found that the dark…
Within the context of supersymmetric hybrid inflation, we study a multiple-stage inflationary scenario that can generate a primordial spectrum of adiabatic density perturbations with a break at $k_b \simeq 0.05 h Mpc^{-1}$. The presence of…
Recently multi-field inflation models that can produce large scalar fluctuations on small scales have drawn a lot of attention, primarily because they could lead to primordial black hole production and generation of large second-order…
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…
Higher-form flux that extends in all 3+1 dimensions of spacetime is a source of positive vacuum energy that can drive meta-stable eternal inflation. If the flux also threads compact extra dimensions, the spontaneous nucleation of a bubble…
Recently, we have shown that scalar spectra with lower power on large scales and certain other features naturally occur in {\it punctuated inflation}, i.e. the scenario wherein a brief period of rapid roll is sandwiched between two stages…
We present here the effective theory of inflation `a la Ginsburg-Landau in which the inflaton potential is a polynomial. The slow-roll expansion becomes a systematic 1/N expansion where N ~ 60. The spectral index and the ratio of…
In a recent paper we showed how Starobinsky-like inflation could emerge from dilaton dynamics in brane cosmology scenarios based on string theory, in which our universe is represented as a three-brane and the effective potential acquires a…
The power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background from both the Planck and WMAP data exhibits a slight dip in for multipoles in the range of l=10-30. We show that such a dip could be the result of resonant creation of a massive particle…
We numerically compute features in the power-spectrum that originate from the decay of fields during inflation. Using a simple, phenomenological, multi-field setup, we increase the number of fields from a few to thousands. Whenever a field…
In Chain Inflation the universe tunnels along a series of false vacua of ever-decreasing energy. The main goal of this paper is to embed Chain Inflation in high energy fundamental physics. We begin by illustrating a simple effective…
With Planck cosmic microwave background observations, we established the spectral amplitude and tilt of the primordial power spectrum. Evidence of a red spectral tilt ($n_\mathrm{s}=0.96$) at $8\sigma$ provides strong support for the…
Wrap m D5-branes around the 2-cycle of a conifold, place n D3-branes at a point and watch the system relax. The D5-branes source m units of RR 3-form flux on the 3-cycle, which cause dielectric NS5-branes to nucleate and repeatedly sweep…
We discuss ability of the harmonic pattern of peaks in the CMB angular power spectrum to test inflation. By studying robust features of alternate models, which must all be isocurvature in nature, we reveal signatures unique to inflation.…
We calculate the curvature power spectrum sourced by spectator fields that are excited repeatedly and non-adiabatically during inflation. In the absence of detailed information of the nature of spectator field interactions, we consider an…
We derive general analytic formulae for the power spectrum and spectral index of the curvature perturbation produced during inflation driven by a multi-component inflaton field, up to the second order in the slow-roll approximation. We do…
If cosmic inflation suffered tiny time-dependent deviations from the slow-roll regime, these would induce the existence of small scale-dependent features imprinted in the primordial spectra, with their shapes and sizes revealing information…