Related papers: WMAPping the Inflationary Universe
The early stages of the universe evolution are discussed according to the hot big bang model and the grand unified theories. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized and their resolution by inflationary cosmology is sketched.…
I discuss how parameters describing inflation in the very early universe may be related to primordial perturbation spectra. Precision observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) such as those provided by the WMAP…
We re-analyze the question of the use of cosmological observations to infer the present state and future evolution of our patch of the universe. In particular, we discuss under which conditions one might be able to infer that our patch will…
This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…
In this review I briefly describe the evolution of the inflationary theory from the scenario based on the idea of supercooling and expansion in the false vacuum toward the theory of eternally expanding self-reproducing inflationary…
A general overview of the history and present status of inflationary cosmology is given. Recent developments discussed in this paper include the hybrid inflation scenario, the theory of reheating, and the theory of inflating tolopogical…
A continuous process of creation of particles is investigated as a possible connection between the inflationary stage with late cosmic acceleration. In this model, the inflationary era occurs due to a continuous and fast process of creation…
In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
A period of inflation in the early universe produces a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves over a huge range in wavelength. If the amplitude of this gravitational wave background is large enough to be detectable with…
The basic workings of inflationary models are summarized, along with the arguments that strongly suggest that our universe is the product of inflation. The mechanisms that lead to eternal inflation in both new and chaotic models are…
We consider the fate of the observable universe in the light of the discovery of a dark energy component to the cosmic energy budget. We extend results for a cosmological constant to a general dark energy component and examine the…
Starting from pure multidimensional gravity with curvature-nonlinear terms but no matter fields in the initial action, we obtain a cosmological model with two effective scalar fields related to the size of two extra factor spaces. The model…
There is very strong circumstantial evidence that there was an inflationary epoch very early in the history of the universe. In this lecture I will describe how we might be able to piece together some understanding of the dynamics during…
We argue that the emergent spacetime picture admits a background-independent formulation of cosmic inflation. The inflation in this picture corresponds to the dynamical emergence of spacetime while the conventional inflation is simply an…
A geometric spacetime map of the universe is presented, addressing problems inherent in deep space observations and cosmology. Implications for the observer's perspective, the cosmological "horizon" and "flatness" problem, "inflation", and…
The cosmic inflation hypothesis, its relation to fundamental theory on the beginning of the universe, and the light that both shed on how the various elements and their relative amounts came into existence. The fundamental factors…
This series of lectures gives a pedagogical review of the subject of cosmological inflation. I discuss Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology and the horizon and flatness problems of the standard hot Big Bang, and introduce inflation as a…
We study how the initial inhomogeneities of the spatial curvature affect the onset of inflation in the closed universe. We consider a cosmological model which contains a radiation and a cosmological constant. In order to treat the…
In order to draw out the essential behavior of the universe, investigations of early universe cosmology often reduce the complex system to a simple integrable system. Inflationary models are of this kind as they focus on simple scalar field…