Search results for "Inflation"
showing 10 items of 210 documents
Constant-roll inflation: confrontation with recent observational data
2017
The previously proposed class of phenomenological inflationary models in which the assumption of inflaton slow-roll is replaced by the more general, constant-roll condition is compared with the most recent cosmological observational data, mainly the Planck ones. Models in this two-parametric class which remain viable appear to be close to the slow-roll ones, and their inflaton potentials are close to (but still different from) that of the natural inflation model. Permitted regions for the two model parameters are presented.
f(R) constant-roll inflation
2017
The previously introduced class of two-parametric phenomenological inflationary models in General Relativity in which the slow-roll assumption is replaced by the more general, constant-roll condition is generalized to the case of $f(R)$ gravity. A simple constant-roll condition is defined in the original Jordan frame, and exact expressions for a scalaron potential in the Einstein frame, for a function $f(R)$ (in the parametric form) and for inflationary dynamics are obtained. The region of the model parameters permitted by the latest observational constraints on the scalar spectral index and the tensor-to-scalar ratio of primordial metric perturbations generated during inflation is determin…
Narrowing the window of inflationary magnetogenesis
2017
We consider inflationary magnetogenesis where the conformal symmetry is broken by the term $f^2(\phi) F_{\alpha\beta} F^{\alpha\beta}$. We assume that the magnetic field power spectrum today between 0.1 and $10^4$ Mpc is a power law, with upper and lower limits from observation. This fixes $f$ to be close to a power law in conformal time in the window during inflation when the modes observed today are generated. In contrast to previous work, we do not make any assumptions about the form of $f$ outside these scales. We cover all possible reheating histories, described by an average equation of state $-1/3 <\bar{w} <1$. Requiring that strong coupling and large backreaction are avoided both at…
The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe
2020
It is commonly assumed that the energy density of the Universe was dominated by radiation between reheating after inflation and the onset of matter domination 54,000 years later. While the abundance of light elements indicates that the Universe was radiation dominated during Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), there is scant evidence that the Universe was radiation dominated prior to BBN. It is therefore possible that the cosmological history was more complicated, with deviations from the standard radiation domination during the earliest epochs. Indeed, several interesting proposals regarding various topics such as the generation of dark matter, matter-antimatter asymmetry, gravitational waves,…
The 1-loop effective potential for the Standard Model in curved spacetime
2018
The renormalisation group improved Standard Model effective potential in an arbitrary curved spacetime is computed to one loop order in perturbation theory. The loop corrections are computed in the ultraviolet limit, which makes them independent of the choice of the vacuum state and allows the derivation of the complete set of $\beta$-functions. The potential depends on the spacetime curvature through the direct non-minimal Higgs-curvature coupling, curvature contributions to the loop diagrams, and through the curvature dependence of the renormalisation scale. Together, these lead to significant curvature dependence, which needs to be taken into account in cosmological applications, which i…
Constraints on Cosmic Strings Using Data from the Third Advanced LIGO–Virgo Observing Run
2021
We search for gravitational-wave signals produced by cosmic strings in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo full O3 data set. Search results are presented for gravitational waves produced by cosmic string loop features such as cusps, kinks and, for the first time, kink-kink collisions.cA template-based search for short-duration transient signals does not yield a detection. We also use the stochastic gravitational-wave background energy density upper limits derived from the O3 data to constrain the cosmic string tension, $G\mu$, as a function of the number of kinks, or the number of cusps, for two cosmic string loop distribution models.cAdditionally, we develop and test a third model which interpolat…
Renormalisation group improvement in the stochastic formalism
2019
We investigate compatibility between the stochastic infrared (IR) resummation of light test fields on inflationary spacetimes and renormalisation group running of the ultra-violet (UV) physics. Using the Wilsonian approach, we derive improved stochastic Langevin and Fokker-Planck equations which consistently include the renormalisation group effects. With the exception of stationary solutions, these differ from the naive approach of simply replacing the classical potential in the standard stochastic equations with the renormalisation group improved potential. Using this new formalism, we exemplify the IR dynamics with the Yukawa theory during inflation, illustrating the differences between …
Infrared lessons for ultraviolet gravity: the case of massive gravity and Born-Infeld
2014
We generalize the ultraviolet sector of gravitation via a Born-Infeld action using lessons from massive gravity. The theory contains all of the elementary symmetric polynomials and is treated in the Palatini formalism. We show how the connection can be solved algebraically to be the Levi-Civita connection of an effective metric. The non-linearity of the algebraic equations yields several branches, one of which always reduces to General Relativity at low curvatures. We explore in detail a {\it minimal} version of the theory, for which we study solutions in the presence of a perfect fluid with special attention to the cosmological evolution. In vacuum we recover Ricci-flat solutions, but also…
Tensor bounds on the hidden universe
2018
During single clock inflation, hidden fields (i.e. fields coupled to the inflaton only gravitationally) in their adiabatic vacua can ordinarily only affect observables through virtual effects. After renormalizing background quantities (fixed by observations at some pivot scale), all that remains are logarithmic runnings in correlation functions that are both Planck and slow roll suppressed. In this paper we show how a large number of hidden fields can partially compensate this suppression and generate a potentially observable running in the tensor two point function, consistently inferable courtesy of a large $N$ resummation. We detour to address certain subtleties regarding loop correction…
Transplanckian inflation as gravity echoes
2015
In this work, we show that, in the presence of non-minimal coupling to gravity, it is possible to generate sizeable tensor modes in single-field models without transplanckian field values. These transplanckian field values apparently needed in Einstein gravity to accommodate the experimental results may only be due to our insistence of imposing a minimal coupling of the inflaton field to gravity in a model with non-minimal couplings. We present three simple single-field models that prove that it is possible accommodate a large tensor-to-scalar ratio without requiring transplanckian field values within the slow-roll regime.