English

Challenges for Inflationary Cosmology

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology High Energy Physics - Phenomenology High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

Inflationary cosmology has provided a predictive and phenomenologically very successful scenario for early universe cosmology. Attempts to implement inflation using scalar fields, however, lead to models with serious conceptual problems. I will discuss some of the problems, explain why string theory could provide solutions to a subset of these problems, and give a brief overview of ``string gas cosmology'', one of the approaches to merge string theory and early universe cosmology.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0411671,
  title  = {Challenges for Inflationary Cosmology},
  author = {Robert H. Brandenberger},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0411671},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

Plenary talk at PASCOS-04/NathFest, August 2004, to be published in the proceedings (2 minor comments added to this second version)