Related papers: Vacuum Sampling in the Landscape during Inflation
Allowing for the possibility of large extra dimensions, the fundamental Planck scale $M$ could be anywhere in the range $\TeV\lsim M\lsim \mpl$, where $\mpl=2.4\times 10^{18}\GeV$ is the four-dimensional Planck scale. If $M\sim\TeV$,…
We attempt an estimate for the distribution of the tensor mode fraction $r$ over the landscape of vacua in string theory. The dynamics of eternal inflation and quantum tunneling lead to a kind of democracy on the landscape, providing no…
Meta-stable dark sector particles decaying into electrons or photons may non-trivially change the Hubble rate, lead to entropy injection into the thermal bath of Standard Model particles and may also photodisintegrate light nuclei formed in…
We consider our universe as a 3d domain wall embedded in a 5d dimensional Minkowski space-time. We address the problem of inflation and late time acceleration driven by bulk particles colliding with the 3d domain wall. The expansion of our…
The QCD axion can solve the Strong CP Problem and be the dark matter of our universe. If the PQ symmetry breaking scale associated with the axion is below the inflationary reheating temperature, axion strings and domain walls populate the…
We investigate the inflationary consequences of the oscillating dark energy model proposed by Ti\'an [\href{https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.101.063531}{Phys. Rev. D {\bf 101}, 063531 (2020)}], which aims to solve the cosmological…
It has recently been shown [1] that light vector particles produced from inflationary fluctuations can give rise to the dark matter in the Universe. A similar mechanism has been discussed in [2] for a non-minimally coupled scalar enjoying a…
A scenario in which primeval black holes (PBHs) form at the end of an extended inflationary period is capable of producing, via Hawking radiation, the observed entropy, as well as the observed dark matter density in the form of Planck mass…
We present a natural scenario for obtaining an open universe ($\Omega _0<1$) through inflation. In this scenario, there are two epochs of inflationary expansion---an epoch of `old inflation,' during which the inflaton field is stuck in a…
TeV size extra dimensions introduce domain walls. Such walls are inconsistent with CMB anisotropies. Either inflationary dynamics washes them out, or the reheating temperature is lower then the temperature at which the walls start forming…
In the presence of a short-distance cutoff, the choice of a vacuum state in an inflating, non-de Sitter universe is unavoidably ambiguous. The ambiguity is related to the time at which initial conditions for the mode functions are specified…
We study whether a first-order phase transition at the end of inflation can generate the observed dark matter abundance through bubble collisions. The transition occurs in a spectator scalar sector with an inflaton-dependent effective…
Light new vector bosons can be produced gravitationally through quantum fluctuations during inflation; if these particles are feebly coupled and cosmologically metastable, they can account for the observed dark matter abundance. However, in…
We study the realization of cosmic inflation in bigravity theories. By analyzing the evolution of scalar, vector, and tensor perturbations in de Sitter-like spacetimes, we find strong stability constraints on the class of viable vacua…
In BP models with hundreds of fluxes, we compute the effects of cosmological dynamics on the probability distribution of landscape vacua. Starting from generic initial conditions, we find that most fluxes are dynamically driven into a…
We study the impact of light GeV-scale heavy neutral leptons (HNLs) on Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) in the neutrino-extended Standard Model Effective Field Theory ($\nu$SMEFT). We show that, based on very general considerations, BBN…
In this paper we present a new scenario where massive Primordial Black Holes (PBH) are produced from the collapse of large curvature perturbations generated during a mild waterfall phase of hybrid inflation. We determine the values of the…
The growing evidence of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers has renewed the interest in study of primordial black holes (PBH). Here we study a mechanism for the formation of PBH from collapse of pseudo-topological domain…
We investigate the recently proposed hybrid inflation models with two stages of inflation. We show that quantum fluctuations at the time corresponding to the phase transition between the two inflationary stages can trigger the formation of…
We determine the frequency of regions of small-field inflation in the Wigner landscape as an approximation to random supergravities/type IIB flux compactifications. We show that small-field inflation occurs exponentially more often than…