We consider that the pre-inflation era is radiation-dominated, transiting smoothly to the inflationary era. We work out in detail the dynamics of inflaton fluctuations across the phase transition and the proper choices of initial vacuum states. It is found that this phase transition can suppress longwavelength quantum fluctuations of inflaton. This may attribute to the large-scale CMB anisotropy a lower power than predicted in the standard ΛCDM model. In constraining this transitional effect by WMAP anisotropy data, we use the WMAP best-fit scale-invariant ΛCDM model with the density power spectrum replaced by the one found in this work. We find that the transition occurs at least about 10 e-folds before the comoving scales comparable to our present horizon size cross the Hubble radius during inflation.PACS numbers: 98.80. Cq, 98.70.Vc, 98.80.Es

A numerical study of a pseudoscalar inflation having an axion-photon-like coupling is performed by solving numerically the coupled differential equations of motion for inflaton and photon mode functions from the onset of inflation to the end of reheating. The backreaction due to particle production is also included self-consistently. We find that this particular inflation model realizes the idea of a warm inflation in which a steady thermal bath is established by the particle production. In most cases this thermal bath exceeds the amount of radiation released in the reheating process. In the strong coupling regime, the transition from the inflationary to the radiation-dominated phase does not involve either a preheating or reheating process. In addition, energy density peaks produced near the end of inflation may lead to the formation of primordial black holes.

We give a full analysis of the auto-and cross-correlations between the Stokes parameters of the cosmic microwave background. In particular, we derive the windowing function for an antenna with Gaussian response in polarization experiment, and construct correlation function estimators corrected for instrumental noise. They are applied to calculate the signal to noise ratios for future anisotropy and polarization measurements. While the small-angular-scale anisotropy-polarization correlation would be likely detected by the MAP satellite, the detection of electric and magnetic polarization would require higher experimental sensitivity. For large-angular-scale measurements such as the being planned SPOrt/ISS, the expected signal to noise ratio for polarization is greater than one only for reionized models with high reionization redshifts, and the ratio is less for anisotropypolarization correlation. Correlation and covariance matrices for likelihood analyses of ground-based and satellite data are also given.

We discuss the effect of quantum stress tensor fluctuations in deSitter spacetime upon the expansion of a congruence of timelike geodesics. We treat a model in which the expansion fluctuations begin on a given hypersurface in deSitter spacetime, and find that this effect tends to grow, in contrast to the situation in flat spacetime. This growth potentially leads to observable consequences in inflationary cosmology in the form of density perturbations which depend upon the duration of the inflationary period. In the context of our model, the effect may be used to place upper bounds on this duration.