Plateau inflation is an experimentally consistent framework in which the scale of inflation can be kept relatively low. Close to the edge of the plateau, scalar perturbations are subject to a strong tachyonic instability. Tachyonic preheating is real
ized when, after inflation, the oscillating inflaton repeatedly re-enters the plateau. We develop the analytic theory of this process and expand the linear approach by including backreaction between the coherent background and growing perturbations. For a family of plateau models, the analytic predictions are confronted with numerical estimates. Our analysis shows that the inflaton fragments in a fraction of an $e$-fold in all examples supporting tachyonic preheating, generalizing the results of previous similar studies. In these scenarios, the scalar-to-tensor ratio is tiny, $r<10^{-7}$.
We study the prospects of future gravitational wave (GW) detectors in probing primordial black hole (PBH) binaries. We show that across a broad mass range from $10^{-5}M_odot$ to $10^7M_odot$, future GW interferometers provide a potential probe of th
e PBH abundance that is more sensitive than any currently existing experiment. In particular, we find that galactic PBH binaries with masses as low as $10^{-5}M_odot$ may be probed with ET, AEDGE and LISA by searching for nearly monochromatic continuous GW signals. Such searches could independently test the PBH interpretation of the ultrashort microlensing events observed by OGLE. We also consider the possibility of observing GWs from asteroid mass PBH binaries through graviton-photon conversion.
We study preheating in the Palatini formalism with a quadratic inflaton potential and an added $alpha R^2$ term. In such models, the oscillating inflaton field repeatedly returns to the plateau of the Einstein frame potential, on which the tachyonic
instability fragments the inflaton condensate within less than an e-fold. We find that tachyonic preheating takes place when $alpha gtrsim 10^{13}$ and that the energy density of the fragmented field grows with the rate $Gamma/H approx 0.011 times alpha^{0.31}$. The model extends the family of plateau models with similar preheating behaviour. Although it contains non-canonical quartic kinetic terms in the Einstein frame, we show that, in the first approximation, these can be neglected during both preheating and inflation.
We show that the recent NANOGrav result can be interpreted as a stochastic gravitational wave signal associated to formation of primordial black holes from high-amplitude curvature perturbations. The indicated amplitude and power of the gravitational
wave spectrum agrees well with formation of primordial seeds for supermassive black holes.
We show that the electron recoil excess around 2 keV claimed by the Xenon collaboration can be fitted by DM or DM-like particles having a fast component with velocity of order $sim 0.1$. Those particles cannot be part of the cold DM halo of our Galax
y, so we speculate about their possible nature and origin, such as fast moving DM sub-haloes, semi-annihilations of DM and relativistic axions produced by a nearby axion star. Feasible new physics scenarios must accommodate exotic DM dynamics and unusual DM properties.
In the Starobinsky model of inflation, the observed dark matter abundance can be produced from the direct decay of the inflaton field only in a very narrow spectrum of close-to-conformal scalar fields and spinors of mass $sim 10^7$ GeV. This spectrum
can be, however, significantly broadened in the presence of effective non-renormalizable interactions between the dark and the visible sectors. In particular, we show that UV freeze-in can efficiently generate the right dark matter abundance for a large range of masses spanning from the keV to the PeV scale and arbitrary spin, without significantly altering the heating dynamics. We also consider the contribution of effective interactions to the inflaton decay into dark matter.
4-derivative gravity provides a renormalizable theory of quantum gravity at the price of introducing a physical ghost, which could admit a sensible positive-energy quantization. To understand its physics, we compute ghost-mediated scatterings among m
atter particles at tree-level, finding a new power-like infra-red enhancement typical of 4-derivative theories, that we dub $ghostrahlung$. Super-Planckian scatterings get downgraded to Planckian by radiating hard gravitons and ghosts, which are weakly coupled and carry away the energy.
