No Arabic abstract
We study a nonsingular bounce inflation model, which can drive the early universe from a contracting phase, bounce into an ordinary inflationary phase, followed by the reheating process. Besides the bounce that avoided the Big-Bang singularity which appears in the standard cosmological scenario, we make use of the Horndesky theory and design the kinetic and potential forms of the lagrangian, so that neither of the two big problems in bouncing cosmology, namely the ghost and the anisotropy problems, will appear. The cosmological perturbations can be generated either in the contracting phase or in the inflationary phase, where in the latter the power spectrum will be scale-invariant and fit the observational data, while in the former the perturbations will have nontrivial features that will be tested by the large scale structure experiments. We also fit our model to the CMB TT power spectrum.
We investigate the consequences of general curved trajectories in multi-field inflation. After setting up a completely general formalism using the mass basis, which naturally accommodates the notion of light and heavy modes, we study in detail the simple case of two successive turns in two-field system. We find the power spectrum of the curvature perturbation receives corrections that exhibit oscillatory features sinusoidal in the logarithm of the comoving wavenumber without slow-roll suppression. We show that this is because of the resonance of the heavy modes inside and outside the mass horizon.
We consider an alternative to inflation for the generation of superhorizon perturbations in the universe in which the speed of sound is faster than the speed of light. We label such cosmologies, first proposed by Armendariz-Picon, {it tachyacoustic}, and explicitly construct examples of non-canonical Lagrangians which have superluminal sound speed, but which are causally self-consistent. Such models possess two horizons, a Hubble horizon and an acoustic horizon, which have independent dynamics. Even in a decelerating (non-inflationary) background, a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of perturbations can be generated by quantum perturbations redshifted outside of a shrinking acoustic horizon. The acoustic horizon can be large or even infinite at early times, solving the cosmological horizon problem without inflation. These models do not, however, dynamically solve the cosmological flatness problem, which must be imposed as a boundary condition. Gravitational wave modes, which are produced by quantum fluctuations exiting the Hubble horizon, are not produced.
We study models of inflation where the scalar field $phi$ that drives inflation is coupled non-minimally to gravity via $xi phi^2 R$, or where the gravity sector is enlarged by an $R^2$ term. We consider the original Higgs inflation, Starobinsky inflation, and two differe
In this short paper, we present constraints on the Galileon inflationary model from the CMB bispectrum. We employ a principal-component analysis of the independent degrees of freedom constrained by data and apply this to the WMAP 9-year data to constrain the free parameters of the model. A simple Bayesian comparison establishes that support for the Galileon model from bispectrum data is at best weak.
By incorporating quantum aspects of gravity, Loop Quantum Cosmology (LQC) provides a self-consistent extension of the inflationary scenario, allowing for modifications in the primordial inflationary power spectrum with respect to the standard General Relativity one. We investigate such modifications and explore the constraints imposed by the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Planck Collaboration data on the Warm Inflation (WI) scenario in the LQC context. We obtain useful relations between the dissipative parameter of WI and the bounce scale parameter of LQC. We also find that the number of required e-folds of expansion from the bounce instant till the moment the observable scales crossed the Hubble radius during inflation can be smaller in WI than in CI. In particular, we find that this depends on how large is the dissipation in WI, with the amount of required e-folds decreasing with the increasing of the dissipation value. Furthermore, by performing a Monte Carlo Markov Chain analysis for the considered WI models, we find good agreement of the model with the data. This shows that the WI models studied here can explain the current observations also in the context of LQC.