相关论文: How to Produce an Arbitrarily Small Tensor to Scal…

We study reheating in $\alpha$-attractor models of inflation in which the inflaton couples to other scalars or fermions. We show that the parameter space contains viable regions in which the inflaton couplings to radiation can be determined…

It is sometimes argued that observation of tensor modes from inflation would provide the first evidence for quantum gravity. However, in the usual inflationary formalism, also the scalar modes involve quantised metric perturbations. We…

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.…

We study a general Scalar-Tensor Theory with an arbitrary coupling funtion $\omega (\phi )$ but also an arbitrary dependence of the ``gravitational constant'' $G(\phi )$ in the cases in which either one of them, or both, do not admit an…

We construct ensembles of random scalar potentials for $N_f$ interacting scalar fields using non-equilibrium random matrix theory, and use these to study the generation of observables during small-field inflation. For $N_f={\cal O}({\rm…

It is believed that the recent detection of large tensor perturbations strongly favors the inflation scenario in the early universe. This common sense depends on the assumption that Einstein's general relativity is valid at the early…

In this paper, we present quantitative constraints on the scalar field potential for a general class of inflationary models. (1) We first consider the reconstruction of the inflationary potential for given primordial density fluctuation…

A plethora of inflationary models can produce interesting small-scale phenomenology, such as enhanced scalar fluctuations leading to primordial black hole (PBH) production and large scalar-induced GW. Nevertheless, good models must…

Extending our previous work on the robustness of inflation to perturbations in the scalar field, we investigate the effects of perturbations in the transverse traceless part of the extrinsic curvature on the evolution of an inhomogeneous…

We consider $R^p$ inflation with $p \approx 2$, allowing small deviation from $R^2$ inflation. Using the inflaton potential in the Einstein frame, we construct a consistency relation between the scalar spectral index, the tensor-to-scalar…

The BICEP2 observation of a large tensor-to-scalar ratio, $r = 0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$, implies that the inflaton $\phi$ in single-field inflation models must satisfy $\phi \sim 10M_{Pl}$ in order to produce sufficient inflation. This is a…

We construct models of inflation with many randomly interacting fields and use these to study the generation of cosmological observables. We model the potentials as multi-dimensional Gaussian random fields (GRFs) and identify powerful…

The BICEP2 experiment confirms the existence of primordial gravitational wave with the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r=0$ ruled out at $7\sigma$ level. The consistency of this large value of $r$ with the {\em Planck} data requires a large…

We investigate the possibility of obtaining inflationary solutions of the slow roll type from a low energy Lagrangian coming from superstrings. The advantage of such an approach is that in these theories the scalar potential has only one…

This is a version of the author's Ph.D. thesis. The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field and to perform a general analysis of the associated non-Gaussianities. We…

In single-field, slow-roll inflationary models, scalar and tensorial (Gaussian) perturbations are both characterized by a zero mean and a non-zero variance. In position space, the corresponding variance of those fields diverges in the…

We show that an inflationary background might be realized by using any p-form non-minimally coupled to gravity. Standard scalar field inflation corresponds to the 0-form case and vector inflation to the 1-form. Moreover, we show that the 2-…

The original model of axion natural inflation produces a tensor-to-scalar ratio above the experimental limit. Aligned axion inflation admits inflationary trajectories that originate near a saddle point of the two-field potential, and…

We explore the inflationary phase of a scalar field with a kinetic term non-minimally coupled to gravity. We find that one of the slow-roll conditions is naturally consequence of the equation of motion of the scalar field. Thus, slow-roll…

A safe way to reheat the universe, in models of natural and quadratic inflation, is through shift symmetric couplings between the inflaton $\phi$ and the Standard Model (SM), since they do not generate loop corrections to the potential…