Related papers: Observing alternatives to inflation
A particular compensation-type solution of the main cosmological constant problem has been proposed recently, with two massless vector fields dynamically canceling an arbitrary cosmological constant \Lambda. The naive expectation is that…
Inflation is a highly favoured theory for the early Universe. It is compatible with current observations of the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure and is a driver in the quest to detect primordial gravitational waves. It…
It has been proposed that the successful inflationary description of density perturbations on cosmological scales is sensitive to the details of physics at extremely high (trans-Planckian) energies. We test this proposal by examining how…
Currently, a method has been developed for the cosmological inflation model with a single scalar field to calculate cosmological parameters such as the power spectrum of scalar and tensor perturbations, their spectral indices, and the…
In this article we review the theory of cosmological inflation with a particular focus on the beautiful connection it provides between the physics of the very small and observations of the very large. We explain how quantum mechanical…
Inflation produces super-horizon sized perturbations that ultimately return within the horizon and are thought to form the seeds of all observed large scale structure in the Universe. But inflationary predictions can only be compared with…
While inflation gives an appealing explanation of observed cosmological data, there are a wide range of different inflation models, providing differing predictions for the initial perturbations. Typically models are motivated either by…
These lectures are intended to give a pedagogical introduction to the main current picture of the very early universe. After elementary reviews of general relativity and of the standard Big Bang model, the following subjects are discussed:…
Theory testing in the physical sciences has been revolutionized in recent decades by Bayesian approaches to probability theory. Here, I will consider Bayesian approaches to theory extensions, that is, theories like inflation which aim to…
We consider the question of deriving initial conditions for scalar fields in driving both an early and late quintessence phase. The dark energy field presents an unresolved uniformity problem. Further difficulties with initial conditions…
The status of quantum cosmologies as testable models of the early universe is assessed in the context of inflation. While traditional Wheeler-DeWitt quantization is unable to produce sizable effects in the cosmic microwave background, the…
Inflation has by-far set itself as one of the prime ideas in the current cosmological models that seemingly has an answer for every observed phenomenon in cosmology. More importantly, it serves as a bridge between the early quantum…
Using the dS/QFT correspondence in the context of inflation allows for the study of interesting, otherwise inaccessible physics. In particular, by studying inflation via its dual field theory at the boundary of the de Sitter space, it may…
An introductory account is given of the modern understanding of the physics of the early Universe. Particular emphasis is placed on the paradigm of cosmological inflation, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the…
Warm inflation has normalized two ideas in cosmology, that in the early universe the initial primordial density perturbations generally could be of classical rather than quantum origin and that during inflation, particle production from…
Nonlocal cosmological models are studied extensively in recent times because of their interesting cosmological consequences. In this paper, we have analyzed background cosmology on a class of non-local models which are motivated by the…
Recent debates around the testability of the inflationary paradigm raise the question of how to model-independently discriminate it from competing scenarios. We argue that a detection of the Cosmic Graviton Background (CGB), the relic…
The big bang model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories are introduced. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent…
We systematically review some standard issues and also the latest developments of modified gravity in cosmology, emphasizing on inflation, bouncing cosmology and late-time acceleration era. Particularly, we present the formalism of standard…
In this dissertation, we introduce a general way of modeling inflation in a framework that is independent of the exact nature of the inflationary potential. Because of the choice of our initial conditions and the continuity of the scale…