Scalar fields

NANOGrav Hints on Planet-Mass Primordial Black Holes

Recently, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) claimed the detection of a stochastic common-spectrum process of the pulsar timing array (PTA) time residuals from their 12.5 year data, which might be the first …

Neutrino masses, vacuum stability and quantum gravity prediction for the mass of the top quark

A general prediction from asymptotically safe quantum gravity is the approximate vanishing of all quartic scalar couplings at the UV fixed point beyond the Planck scale. A vanishing Higgs doublet quartic coupling near the Planck scale translates into …

Induced gravitational waves as a probe of thermal history of the universe

The scalar perturbation induced gravitational waves are a probe of the primordial density perturbation spectrum on small scales. In this paper, we show that they can also probe the thermal history of the universe. We assume the universe underwent a …

Induced gravitational waves in a general cosmological background

Gravitational waves are inevitably produced by second order terms in cosmological perturbation theory. Most notably, the so-called induced gravitational waves are a window to the small scales part of the primordial spectrum of fluctuations and a key …

Could the black hole singularity be a field singularity?

In the wake of interest to find black hole solutions with scalar hair, we investigate the effects of disformal transformations on static spherically symmetric space-times with a non-trivial scalar field. In particular, we study solutions that have a …

Magneto-genesis

Intergalactic magnetic fields generated in the early universe?

New physics in the CMB

What can we learn from the cosmic microwave background?

Mimicking features in alternatives to inflation with interacting spectator fields

It has been argued that oscillatory features from spectator fields in the primordial power spectrum could be a probe of alternatives to inflation. In this work, we soften this claim by showing that the frequency and amplitude dependence of the …

Gravitational waves from global cosmic strings in quintessential inflation

The combination of non-minimal couplings to gravity with the post-inflationary kinetic-dominated era typically appearing in quintessential inflation scenarios may lead to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of internal symmetries and its eventual …

Doppelgänger dark energy: modified gravity with non-universal couplings after GW170817

Gravitational Wave (GW) astronomy severely narrowed down the theoretical space for scalar-tensor theories. We propose a new class of attractor models {for Horndeski action} in which GWs propagate at the speed of light in the nearby universe but not …