Observable predictions of generalised inflationary scenarios

Understand

Inflation is an early period of accelerated cosmic expansion, thought to be sourced by high energy physics.

• A key task today is to use the influx of increasingly precise observational data to constrain the plethora of inflationary models suggested by fundamental theories of interactions.
• This requires a robust theoretical framework for quantifying the predictions of such models; helping to develop such a framework is the aim of this thesis.
• We provide the first complete quantization of subhorizon perturbations for the well-motivated class of multi-field inflationary models with a non-trivial field metric, which we show may yield interesting signatures in the bispectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).