Related papers: Vacuum Sampling in the Landscape during Inflation
If a theory has more than one classically stable vacuum, quantum tunneling and thermal jumps make the transition between the vacua possible. The transition happens through a first order phase transition started by nucleation of a bubble of…
We evaluate the probability that a loop of string that has spontaneously nucleated during inflation will form a black hole upon collapse, after the end of inflation. We then use the observational bounds on the density of primordial black…
Using ideas of STM theory, but starting from a 6D vacuum state, we propose an inflationary model where the universe emerges from the blast of a white hole. Under this approach, the expansion is affected by a geometrical deformation induced…
A simple model of uniformly expanding, homogeneous Universe with a bulk viscosity is studied wherein the inflationary density decays due to viscous dissipation during the expansion phase of the Universe. The model is shown to generate the…
Topologically protected sheet-like surfaces, called domain walls, form when the potential of a field has a discrete symmetry that is spontaneously broken. Since this condition is commonplace in field theory, it is plausible that many of…
Last year we argued that if slow-roll inflation followed the decay of a false vacuum in a large landscape, the steepening of the scalar potential between the inflationary plateau and the barrier generically leads to a potentially observable…
We consider an inflationary scenario where the energy scale of inflation stems from gauge theory dynamics. We point out its generic implications on vacuum selection of our universe, in particular, on determination of spacetime symmetries…
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…
A pseudo-Nambu-Goldstone boson, with a potential of the form $ V(\phi) = \Lambda^4 [1 + \cos(\phi/f)]$, can naturally give rise to an epoch of inflation in the early universe (Freese, Frieman, and Olinto 1990). The potential is naturally…
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) is studied within the framework of a two-parameter family of tensor-scalar theories of gravitation, with nonlinear scalar-matter coupling function a(phi). We run a BBN code modified by tensor-scalar gravity,…
A wide variety of vacua, and their cosmological realization, may provide an explanation for the apparently anthropic choices of some parameters of particle physics and cosmology. If the probability on various parameters is weighted by…
During eternal inflation, a landscape of vacua can be populated by the nucleation of bubbles. These bubbles inevitably collide, and collisions sometimes displace the field into a new minimum in a process known as a classical transition. In…
Gravitational waves (GW) produced in the early Universe contribute to the number of relativistic degrees of freedom, $N_{\rm eff}$, during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN). By using the constraints on $N_{\rm eff}$, we present a new bound on…
We explicitly construct a double-field inflationary model, which satisfies the latest Planck constraints at the cosmic microwave background (CMB) scales and produces the whole dark matter energy density as primordial black holes (PBHs), in…
Recent results from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments verify several of the predictions of inflation, while ruling out a number of alternative structure-formation scenarios. Given the successes of the theory, the obvious next…
We review why the search for a causal explanation of the large scale properties of the universe supports the idea that an extended period of accelerated expansion, called inflation, preceded primordial nucleosynthesis. As a consequence of…
We propose a new model-independent mechanism for producing primordial black holes from a period of multi-field inflation. This requires an enhancement of primordial fluctuations at short scales compared to their value at CMB scales. We show…
Motivated by the discovery of a plenitude of metastable vacua in a string landscape and the possibility of rapid tunneling between these vacua, we revisit the dynamics of a false vacuum bubble in a background de Sitter spacetime. We find…
In theories with a broken discrete symmetry, Hubble sized spherical domain walls may spontaneously nucleate during inflation. These objects are subsequently stretched by the inflationary expansion, resulting in a broad distribution of…
A radiative seesaw model with an inert doublet dark matter is a promising candidate which could explain the existence of neutrino masses, dark matter and baryon number asymmetry of the Universe, simultaneously. In addition to these issues,…