37 citations · 90 across the 14 of their papers we have counts for
6 papers · 1 filter
Do Observations Prefer Thawing Quintessence?
Guillaume Payeur, Evan McDonough, Robert Brandenberger
In light of recent observations by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), we study evidence for thawing quintessence over a cosmological constant as dark energy, with emp…
Natural Inflation with Exponentially Small Tensor-To-Scalar Ratio
Dario L. Lorenzoni, David I. Kaiser, Evan McDonough
We demonstrate that "natural inflation", also known as "axion inflation", can be compatible with Planck 2018 measurements of the cosmic microwave background, while predicting an ex…
Gravitational Production of Completely Dark Photons with Nonminimal Couplings to Gravity
Christian Capanelli, Leah Jenks, Edward W. Kolb +1
Dark photons are a theorized massive spin-1 particle which can be produced via various mechanisms, including cosmological gravitational particle production (GPP) in the early unive…
Swampland Conjectures Constraints on Dark Energy from a Highly Curved Field Space
Guillaume Payeur, Evan McDonough, Robert Brandenberger
We study the interplay of the trans-Planckian censorship conjecture (TCC) and the swampland distance conjecture (SDC) in the context of multifield dark energy in a curved field spa…
The Field Theory Axiverse
Stephon Alexander, Tucker Manton, Evan McDonough
Axion and axion-like particles (ALPs) are a prominent candidate for physics beyond the Standard Model, and can play an important role in cosmology, serving as dark matter or dark e…
Runaway Gravitational Production of Dark Photons
Christian Capanelli, Leah Jenks, Edward W. Kolb +1
We demonstrate that gravitational particle production (GPP) of a massive, Abelian, vector (Proca) field during inflation in the presence of nonminimal coupling to gravity may suffe…