We show that the cosmological evolution of a scalar field in a potential can be obtained from a renormalisation group equation. The slow roll regime of inflation models is understood in this context as the slow evolution close to a fixed point, described by the methods of renormalisation group. This explains in part the universality observed in the predictions of a certain number of inflation models. We illustrate this behavior on a certain number of examples and discuss it in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence.
Non-attractor inflation is known as the only single field inflationary scenario that can violate non-Gaussianity consistency relation with the Bunch-Davies vacuum state and generate large local non-Gaussianity. However, it is also known that the non-attractor inflation by itself is incomplete and should be followed by a phase of slow-roll attractor. Moreover, there is a transition process between these two phases. In the past literature, this transition was approximated as instant and the evolution of non-Gaussianity in this phase was not fully studied. In this paper, we follow the detailed evolution of the non-Gaussianity through the transition phase into the slow-roll attractor phase, considering different types of transition. We find that the transition process has important effect on the size of the local non-Gaussianity. We first compute the net contribution of the non-Gaussianities at the end of inflation in canonical non-attractor models. If the curvature perturbations keep evolving during the transition - such as in the case of smooth transition or some sharp transition scenarios - the $mathcal{O}(1)$ local non-Gaussianity generated in the non-attractor phase can be completely erased by the subsequent evolution, although the consistency relation remains violated. In extremal cases of sharp transition where the super-horizon modes freeze immediately right after the end of the non-attractor phase, the original non-attractor result can be recovered. We also study models with non-canonical kinetic terms, and find that the transition can typically contribute a suppression factor in the squeezed bispectrum, but the final local non-Gaussianity can still be made parametrically large.
In this paper, we apply reconstruction techniques to recover the potential parameters for a particular class of single-field models, the $alpha$-attractor (supergravity) models of inflation. This also allows to derive the inflaton vacuum expectation value at horizon crossing. We show how to use this value as one of the input variables to constrain the postaccelerated inflationary phase. We assume that the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ is of the order of $10^{-3}$ , a level reachable by the expected sensitivity of the next-generation CMB experiments.
It has been shown that black holes would have formed in the early Universe if, on any given scale, the spectral amplitude of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) exceeds 10^(-4). This value is within the bounds allowed by astrophysical phenomena for the small scale spectrum of the CMB, corresponding to scales which exit the horizon at the end of slow-roll inflation. Previous work by Kohri et. al. (2007) showed that for black holes to form from a single field model of inflation, the slope of the potential at the end of inflation must be flatter than it was at horizon exit. In this work we show that a phenomenological Hilltop model of inflation, satisfying the Kohri et. al. criteria, could lead to the production of black holes, if the power of the inflaton self-interaction is less than or equal to 3, with a reasonable number or e-folds. We extend our analysis to the running mass model, and confirm that this model results in the production of black holes, and by using the latest WMAP year 5 bounds on the running of the spectral index, and the black hole constraint we update the results of Leach et. al. (2000) excluding more of parameter space.
The recent observations from CMB have imposed a very stringent upper-limit on the tensor/scalar ratio $r$ of inflation models, $r < 0.064$, which indicates that the primordial gravitational waves (PGW), even though possible to be detected, should have a power spectrum of a tiny amplitude. However, current experiments on PGW is ambitious to detect such a signal by improving the accuracy to an even higher level. Whatever their results are, it will give us much information about the early Universe, not only from the astrophysical side but also from the theoretical side, such as model building for the early Universe. In this paper, we are interested in analyzing what kind of inflation models can be favored by future observations, starting with a kind of general action offered by the effective field theory (EFT) approach. We show a general form of $r$ that can be reduced to various models, and more importantly, we show how the accuracy of future observations can put constraints on model parameters by plotting the contours in their parameter spaces.
The NANOGrav pulsar timing array experiment reported evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process affecting pulsar timing residuals in its 12.5-year dataset, which might be interpreted as the first detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). I examine whether the NANOGrav signal might be explained by an inflationary SGWB, focusing on the implications for the tensor spectral index $n_T$ and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$. Explaining NANOGrav while complying with upper limits on $r$ from BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck requires $r gtrsim {cal O}(10^{-6})$ in conjunction with an extremely blue tensor spectrum, $0.7 lesssim n_T lesssim 1.3$. After discussing models which can realize such a blue spectrum, I show that this region of parameter space can be brought in agreement with Big Bang Nucleosynthesis constraints for a sufficiently low reheating scale, $T_{rm rh} lesssim 100,{rm GeV}-1,{rm TeV}$. With the important caveat of having assumed a power-law parametrization for the primordial tensor spectrum, an inflationary interpretation of the NANOGrav signal is therefore not excluded.