In this paper we show how the string landscape can be constrained using observational data. We illustrate this idea by focusing on Fibre Inflation which is a promising class of string inflationary models in type IIB flux compactifications. We determine the values of the microscopic flux-dependent parameters which yield the best fit to the most recent cosmological datasets.
We study initial conditions for inflation in scenarios where the inflaton potential has a plateau shape. Such models are those most favored by Planck data and can be obtained in a large number of model classes. As a representative example, we consider Higgs inflation with and without an $R^2$ term in the context of Palatini gravity. We show that inflation with a large number of e-folds generically occurs in a large part of the parameter space without any fine-tuning of parameters even when the scale of inflation and the inflaton field value during inflation are much smaller than the Planck scale. We discuss consequences for detection of primordial gravitational waves and spectral tilt of curvature perturbations, as well as the recently proposed Trans-Planckian Censorship conjecture.
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 present constraints on the reheating era within the string Fibre Inflation scenario, in terms of the effective equation-of-state parameter of the reheating fluid, $w_{reh}$. The results of the analysis, completely independent on the details of the inflaton physics around the vacuum, illustrate the behavior of the number of $e$-foldings during the reheating stage, $N_{reh}$, and of the final reheating temperature, $T_{reh}$, as functions of the scalar spectral index, $n_s$. We analyze our results with respect to the current bounds given by the PLANCK mission data and to upcoming cosmological experiments. We find that large values of the equation-of-state parameter ($w_{reh}>1/3$) are particularly favored as the scalar spectral index is of the order of $n_ssim 0.9680$, with a $sigma_{n_s}sim 0.002$ error. Moreover, we compare the behavior of the general reheating functions $N_{reh}$ and $T_{reh}$ in the Fibre Inflation scenario with that extracted by the class of the $alpha$-attractor models with $alpha=2$. We find that the corresponding reheating curves are very similar in the two cases.
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.
Although the inflationary paradigm is the most widely accepted explanation for the current cosmological observations, it does not necessarily correspond to what actually happened in the early stages of our Universe. To decide on this issue, two paths can be followed: first, all the possible predictions it makes must be derived thoroughly and compared with available data, and second, all imaginable alternatives must be ruled out. Leaving the first task to all other contributors of this volume, we concentrate here on the second option, focusing on the bouncing alternatives and their consequences.