The cosmological curvature perturbation may be generated when some ‘curvaton’ field, different from the inflaton, oscillates in a background of unperturbed radiation. In its simplest form the curvaton paradigm requires the Hubble parameter during inflation to be bigger than 10 GeV, but this bound may be evaded if the curvaton field (or an associated tachyon) is strongly coupled to a field which...

Central banks in Asia and the Pacific have overwhelmingly chosen inflation as the principal objective of monetary policy. Some central banks have declared themselves to be inflation targeters, while others pursue their objective without referring to this particular label. Moreover, whether or not they refer to their strategy as inflation targeting, central banks in the region have chosen divers...

We provide a new way to filter US inflation into trend and cycle components, based on extracting long-run forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We operate the Kalman filter in reverse, beginning with observed forecasts, then estimating parameters, and then extracting the stochastic trend in inflation. The trend-cycle model with unobserved components is consistent with numerous ...

We live in a very large, very old, and nearly (perhaps exactly) spatially flat universe. The universe we observe is, at least on large scales, remarkably homogeneous and isotropic. These attributes of our universe can be ascribed to a period of very rapid expansion, or inflation, at some time during the very early history of the universe [1]. A sufficiently long epoch of primordial inflation le...

We study the low-temperature limit of warm inflation in a hilltop model. This limit remains valid up to the end of inflation, allowing an analytic description of the entire inflationary stage. In the weak dissipative regime, if the kinetic density of the inflaton dominates after inflation, low scale inflation is attained with Hubble scale as low as 1 GeV. In the strong dissipative regime, the m...

S ince the early 1990s, a number of central banks have adopted numerical inflation targets as a guide for monetary policy. The targets are intended to help central banks achieve and maintain price stability by specifying an explicit goal for monetary policy based on a given time path for a particular measure of inflation. In some cases the targets are expressed as a range for inflation over tim...

A new indexing method is presented which is capable of indexing multiple crystal lattices from narrow wedges of diffraction data. The method takes advantage of a simplification of Fourier transform-based methods that is applicable when the unit-cell dimensions are known a priori. The efficacy of this method is demonstrated with both semi-synthetic multi-lattice data and real multi-lattice data ...

a number of countries, including Australia, over the past decade. The adoption of a framework that focuses explicitly on inflation reflects the growing realization that the major contribution that monetary policy can make to economic growth and welfare in the long run is the maintenance of a low and stable inflation rate. Empirical evidence confirms the detrimental effects of higher inflation o...