The scalar field is considered to have dominated the early Universe. One subtle yet crucial requirement of this assumption is that the solution must be highly stable, i.e., indifferent to any initial conditions because there are no favored ones. Inflation, which is now the most successful early Universe paradigm, answers most of the early Universe's problems, including the fact that it is mostly stable. In this article, in addition to the inflationary solution, we systematically investigate every possible early Universe solution in the presence of a barotropic fluid in the general non-minimal (scalar-tensor) theory. In doing so, we rely upon the classical perturbative techniques. We find, to our surprise, that inflation does not always ensure stability in the Einstein frame, although ekpyrosis can. We also discover that, contrary to the inflationary paradigm, ekpyrosis always assures stability in the presence of any fluid with any equation of state in general non-minimal models. We utilize the conformal transformation to map the inflationary theory in the minimal frame to the ekpyrotic theory in the non-minimal frame, and show that the latter is always much more stable than the former, resulting in a much more preferred model that can even be studied in different contexts such as late time cosmology.
There is increasing evidence from string theory that effective field theories are only reliable over approximately sub-Planckian field excursions. The two most promising effective models for early universe cosmology, inflation and ekpyrosis, are mechanisms that, in order to address cosmological puzzles, must operate over vast expansion/energy ranges. This suggests that it might be appropriate to describe them using scaling laws. Here we combine these two ideas and demonstrate that they drive inflation and ekpyrosis to their extremes: inflation must start at ultra-slow-roll, and ekpyrosis at ul…
This paper investigates the manner in which classical universes are obtained in the no-boundary quantum state. In this context, universes can be characterised as classical (in a WKB sense) when the wavefunction is highly oscillatory, i.e. when the ratio of the change in the amplitude of the wavefunction becomes small compared to the change in the phase. In the presence of a positive or negative exponential potential, the WKB condition is satisfied in proportion to a factor $e^{-(ε- 3)N/(ε-1)},$ where $ε$ is the (constant) slow-roll/fast-roll parameter and $N$ designates the number of e-folds. …
In the framework of scalar-tensor theories of gravity, we construct a new kind of cosmological model that conflates inflation and ekpyrosis. During a phase of conflation, the universe undergoes accelerated expansion, but with crucial differences compared to ordinary inflation. In particular, the potential energy is negative, which is of interest for supergravity and string theory where both negative potentials and the required scalar-tensor couplings are rather natural. A distinguishing feature of the model is that, for a large parameter range, it does not significantly amplify adiabatic scala…
We study the inflationary period driven by a fermionic field which is non-minimally coupled to gravity in the context of the constant-roll approach. We consider the model for a specific form of coupling and perform the corresponding inflationary analysis. By comparing the result with the Planck observations coming from CMB anisotropies, we find the observational constraints on the parameters space of the model and also the predictions the model. We find that the values of $r$ and $n_{s}$ for $-1.5<β\leq-0.9$ are in good agreement with the observations when $|ξ|=0.1$ and $N=60$.
It has been previously shown that the linear inflation appears naturally as a solution of Coleman-Weinberg inflation, provided that the inflaton has a non-minimal coupling to gravity and the Planck scale is dynamically generated. We revisit the previous study by improving the discussion of reheating and by comparing the results of the metric and the Palatini formulations of non-minimal gravity. We find that both formulations predict linear inflation but a different number of $e$-folds. If the non-minimal coupling is larger than one, future experimental sensitivity can discriminate between the …
The theory of cosmological fluctuations assumes that the pre-inflationary state of the universe was the quantum vacuum of a scalar field(s) coupled to gravity. The observed cosmic microwave background fluctuations are then interpreted as quantum fluctuations. Here we consider alternate interpretations of the classic calculations of scalar and tensor power spectra by replacing the Bunch-Davies quantum vacuum with a classical statistical distribution, which may have been the consequence of a pre-inflationary process of decoherence as in the quantum cosmology literature. Mathematically they are e…
We study models of quartic inflation where the inflaton field $ϕ$ is coupled non-minimally to gravity, $ξϕ^2 R$, and perform a study of quantum corrections in curved space-time at one-loop level. We specifically focus on comparing results between the metric and Palatini theories of gravity. Transformation from the Jordan to the Einstein frame gives different results for the two formulations and by using an effective field theory expansion we derive the appropriate $β$-functions and the renormalisation group improved effective potentials in curved space for both cases in the Einstein frame. In …
We study to what extent the spectral index $n_s$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ determine the field excursion $Δϕ$ during inflation. We analyse the possible degeneracy of $Δϕ$ by comparing three broad classes of inflationary models, with different dependence on the number of e-foldings $N$, to benchmark models of chaotic inflation with monomial potentials. The classes discussed cover a large set of inflationary single field models. We find that the field range is not uniquely determined for any value of $(n_s, r)$; one can have the same predictions as chaotic inflation and a very different…
We discuss inflaton decays and reheating in no-scale Starobinsky-like models of inflation, calculating the effective equation-of-state parameter, $w$, during the epoch of inflaton decay, the reheating temperature, $T_{\rm reh}$, and the number of inflationary e-folds, $N_*$, comparing analytical approximations with numerical calculations. We then illustrate these results with applications to models based on no-scale supergravity and motivated by generic string compactifications, including scenarios where the inflaton is identified as an untwisted-sector matter field with direct Yukawa coupling…
In this paper, we study the impact of non-trivial sound on the evolution of cosmological complexity in inflationary period. The vacuum state of curvature perturbation could be treated as squeezed states with two modes, characterized by the two most essential parameters: angle parameter $ϕ_k$ and squeezing parameter $r_k$. Through $Schr\ddot{o}dinger$ equation, one can obtain the corresponding evolution equation of $ϕ_k$ and $r_k$. Subsequently, the quantum circuit complexity between a squeezed vacuum state and squeezed states are evaluated in scalar curvature perturbation with a type of non-tr…
In this paper, we compare dispersions of a scalar field in Euclidean quantum gravity with stochastic inflation. We use Einstein gravity and a minimally coupled scalar field with a quadratic potential. We restrict our attention to small mass and small field cases. In the Euclidean approach, we introduce the ground state wave function which is approximated by instantons. We used a numerical technique to find instantons that satisfy classicality. In the stochastic approach, we introduce the probability distribution of Hubble patches that can be approximated by locally homogeneous universes down t…
We study the tachyon inflation in the presence of the superpotential as an inflationary potential. We study the primordial perturbations and their non-gaussian feature in the equilateral configuration. We use the Planck2018 TT, TE, EE+lowE+lensing+BK14+BAO joint data at $68\%$ CL and $95\%$ CL, to perform numerical analysis on the scalar perturbations and seek for the observational viability of the tachyon inflation with superpotential. We also check the observational viability of the model by studying the tensor part of the perturbations and comparing the results with Planck2018 TT, TE, EE+lo…
The evolutions of the flat FLRW universe and its linear perturbations are studied systematically in the dressed metric approach of LQC. When it is dominated by the kinetic energy of the inflaton at the quantum bounce, the evolution of the background can be divided into three different phases prior to the preheating, {\em bouncing, transition and slow-roll inflation}. During the bouncing phase, the evolution is independent of not only the initial conditions, but also the inflationary potentials. In particular, the expansion factor can be well described by the same exact solution in all the case…
To understand mechanisms leading to inflation and late acceleration of the Universe it is important to see how one or a set of quantum fields may evolve such that the classical energy-momentum tensor behave similar to a cosmological constant. In this work we consider a toy model including 3 scalar fields with very different masses to study the formation of a light axion-like condensate, presumed to be responsible for inflation and/or late accelerating expansion of the Universe. Despite its simplicity, this model reflects hierarchy of masses and couplings of the Standard Model and its candidate…
By starting with a two-fields model in which the fields and their derivatives are nonminimally coupled to gravity, and then by using a conformal gauge, we obtain a model in which the derivatives of the canonically normalized field are nonminimally coupled to gravity. By adopting some appropriate functions, we study two cases with constant and E-model nonminimal derivative coupling, while the potential in both cases is chosen to be E-model one. We show that in contrary to the single field $α$-attractor model that there is an attractor \textit{point} in the large $N$ and small $α$ limits, in our…
In the context of eternal inflation, cosmological predictions depend on the choice of measure to regulate the diverging spacetime volume. The spectrum of inflationary perturbations is no exception, as we demonstrate by comparing the predictions of the fat geodesic and causal patch measures. To highlight the effect of the measure---as opposed to any effects related to a possible landscape of vacua---we take the cosmological model, including the model of inflation, to be fixed. We also condition on the average CMB temperature accompanying the measurement. Both measures predict a 1-point expectat…
We present global fits of cosmologically stable axion-like particle and QCD axion models in the mass range 0.1 neV to 10 eV. We focus on the case where the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is broken before the end of inflation, such that the initial value of the axion field can be considered to be homogeneous throughout the visible Universe. We include detailed likelihood functions from light-shining-through-wall experiments, haloscopes, helioscopes, the axion relic density, horizontal branch stars, supernova 1987A, white dwarf cooling, and gamma-ray observations. We carry out both frequentist and Bayesi…
Holographic cosmology offers a novel framework for describing the very early Universe in which cosmological predictions are expressed in terms of the observables of a three dimensional quantum field theory (QFT). This framework includes conventional slow-roll inflation, which is described in terms of a strongly coupled QFT, but it also allows for qualitatively new models for the very early Universe, where the dual QFT may be weakly coupled. The new models describe a universe which is non-geometric at early times. While standard slow-roll inflation leads to a (near-)power-law primordial power s…
Cosmic strings are a well-motivated extension to the standard cosmological model and could induce a subdominant component in the anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), in addition to the standard inflationary component. The detection of strings, while observationally challenging, would provide a direct probe of physics at very high energy scales. We develop a new framework for cosmic string inference, constructing a Bayesian analysis in wavelet space where the string-induced CMB component has distinct statistical properties to the standard inflationary component. Our wavelet-Ba…
There are many inflationary models that allow the formation of the large-scale structure of the observable universe. The non-gaussianity parameter $f_{NL}$ is a useful tool to discriminate among these cosmological models when comparing the theoretical predictions with the satellite survey results like those from WMAP and Planck. The goal of this proceeding contribution is to review the moment transport equations methodology and the subsequent calculation of the $f_{NL}$ parameter.
