Related papers: WMAPping the Inflationary Universe
Inflation in the early Universe is one of the most promising probes of gravity in the high-energy regime. However, observable scales give access to a limited window in the inflationary dynamics. In this essay, we argue that quantum…
Models of cosmic inflation posit an early phase of accelerated expansion of the universe, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields in curved spacetime. Though detailed assumptions about fields and couplings vary across models,…
This paper is intended to offer a pedagogical treatment of cosmological modeling and inflationary cosmology. In recent years, inflation has become accepted as a standard scenario making predictions that are testable by observations of the…
This article discusses density perturbations in inflationary models, offering a pedagogical description of how these perturbations are generated by quantum fluctuations in the early universe. A key feature of inflation is that that rapid…
In these lectures I review the present status of the so-called Standard Cosmological Model, based on the hot Big Bang Theory and the Inflationary Paradigm. I will make special emphasis on the recent developments in observational cosmology,…
These lectures provide a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the theory of cosmological perturbations generated during inflation which are thought to be the origin of structure in the universe.
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…
We review the latest developments in the determination of the cosmological parameters from the measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) anisotropies and of the Large Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe. We comment…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. It is argued that essentially all inflationary models lead to (future-)eternal…
Despite its central role in modern cosmology, doubts are often expressed as to whether cosmological inflation is really a falsifiable theory. We distinguish two facets of inflation, one as a theory of initial conditions for the hot big bang…
Models of cosmic inflation suggest that our universe underwent an early phase of accelerated expansion, driven by the dynamics of one or more scalar fields. Inflationary models make specific, quantitative predictions for several observable…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
The characteristics of the cosmic microwave background provide circumstantial evidence that the hot radiation-dominated epoch in the early universe was preceded by a period of inflationary expansion. Here, we show how a measurement of the…
The purpose of these lectures is to give a pedagogical introduction to inflation and the production of primordial perturbations, as well as a review of some of the latest developments in this domain. After a short introduction, we review…
Informed by a quantum information perspective, we interpret cosmological expansion of space as growing entanglement between underlying degrees of freedom. In particular, we focus on inflationary cosmology, which, while being a successful…
The cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a snapshot of the early Universe when matter began to become structured and has been the focus of several recent observational campaigns. In this Perspective, we discuss the results from these…
These lecture notes intend to form a short pedagogical introduction to inflationary cosmology, highlighting selected areas of recent progress such as reheating and the theory of cosmological perturbations. Problems of principle for…
We study a class of non-local, action-based, and purely gravitational models. These models seek to describe a cosmology in which inflation is driven by a large, bare cosmological constant that is screened by the self-gravitation between the…