2011/06/11 by Matteo Fasiello, Fasiello, Matteo
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #Geophysics and Gravity Measurements #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1106.2189
openalex publication_date 2011/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This is a version of the author's Ph.D. thesis. The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field and to perform a general analysis of the associated non-Gaussianities. We investigate the amplitudes and shapes of the various three and four-point correlators which are generated by different classes of single-field inflationary models. Besides the well-known results for the so called P(X,ϕ) model and the ghost inflationary theories, which we recover, we point out that extrinsic curvature-generated interactions may give rise to large non-Gaussianities with distinctive features in the form of specific shape-functions (e.g. flat, orthogonal etc..) for the correlators.