相关论文: On the Scale of New Physics in Inflation
The BICEP2 observations, if confirmed, point to a high scale of inflation and large field excursions during the inflationary era. Non-compact string moduli spaces are a suggestive setting for these phenomena. While unlikely to be described…
Because the inflationary mechanism is extremely sensitive to UV-physics, the construction of theoretically robust models of inflation provides a unique window on Planck-scale physics. We review efforts to use an axion with a shift symmetry…
Inflation is often described through the dynamics of a scalar field, slow-rolling in a suitable potential. Ultimately, this inflaton must be identified as the expectation value of a quantum field, evolving in a quantum effective potential.…
In the absence of a theory of everything, modern physicists need to rely on other predictive tools and turned to Effective Field Theories (EFTs) in a number of fields, including but not limited to statistical mechanics, condensed matter,…
Effective field theories offer a powerful method to unify diverse models under a small set of control parameters, allowing systematic expansions around well-established theories. These techniques, developed in particle physics, were…
We point out that the prediction of the minimal chaotic inflation model is altered if a scalar field takes a large field value close to the Planck scale during inflation due to a negative Hubble induced mass. In particular, we show that the…
We investigate an inflationary scenario driven by a complex scalar field nonminimally coupled to gravity and subject to a non-symmetric complex potential. The real part of the potential controls the cosmological background and realizes a…
The general structure of Hybrid Inflation remains a very well-motivated mechanism for lower-scale cosmic inflation in the face of improving constraints on the tensor-to-scalar ratio. However, as originally modeled, the "waterfall" field in…
We present a novel way in which effective field theory (EFT) can break down in cosmological string backgrounds depending on the behavior of the quantum gravity cutoff in infinite distance limits, known as the species scale $\Lambda_s$.…
We derive parity-even graviton bispectra in the Effective Field Theory of Inflation (EFToI) to all orders in derivatives. Working in perturbation theory, we construct all cubic interactions that can contribute to tree-level graviton…
A new family of inflationary models is introduced and analysed. The behaviour of the parameters characterising the models suggest preferred values, which generate the most interesting testable predictions. Results are further improved if…
The idea of the strongly interacting field theories constitutes one of the pillars of the standard model of particle physics. The goal of this work is to export such theories to cosmology. Here we are interested in models in which the…
In this article, we study in detail the linear dynamics and cubic interactions for any number $N_\mathrm{field}$ of scalar fields during inflation, directly in terms of the observable curvature perturbation $\zeta$ and $N_\mathrm{field}-1$…
We construct the Supersymmetric Effective Field Theory of Inflation, that is the most general theory of inflationary fluctuations when time-translations and supersymmetry are spontaneously broken. The non-linear realization of these…
The usual description of inflationary fluctuations uses the framework of quantum field theory (QFT) in curved spacetime, in which quantum fluctuations are superimposed on a classical background spacetime. Even for large fluctuations, such…
We study inflation driven by a slow-rolling inflaton field, characterised by a quadratic potential, and incorporating radiative corrections within the context of supergravity. In this model the energy scale of inflation is not overly…
Observable quantities in cosmology are dimensionless, and therefore independent of the units in which they are measured. This is true of all physical quantities associated with the primordial perturbations that source cosmic microwave…
Given a theory containing both heavy and light fields (the UV theory), a standard procedure is to integrate out the heavy field to obtain an effective field theory (EFT) for the light fields. Typically the EFT equations of motion consist of…
We consider a simple extension of the Standard Model Higgs inflation with one new real scalar field which preserves unitarity up to the Planck scale. The new scalar field (called sigma) completes in the ultraviolet the theory of Higgs…
Inflation has long been the accepted paradigm for understanding the early universe. Most models of inflation have a scalar field acting as the inflaton particle which decays after inflation during a process called reheating into standard…