Related papers: Bouncing alternatives to inflation
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…
Many pedagogical introductions of cosmological inflation are effective due to the simplicity of the relevant equations. Here an analytic solution of the cosmological equations is presented and used as an example to discuss fundamental…
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…
Cosmological inflation is not the only early universe scenario consistent with current observational data. I will discuss the criteria for a successful early universe cosmology, compare a couple of the proposed scenarios (inflation,…
We study a cosmological scenario in which inflation is preceded by a bounce. In this scenario, the primordial singularity, one of the major shortcomings of inflation, is replaced by a non-singular bounce, prior to which the universe…
We describe several different regimes which are possible in inflationary cosmology. The simplest one is inflation without self-reproduction of the universe. In this scenario the universe is not stationary. The second regime, which exists in…
Modern scientific cosmology pushes the boundaries of knowledge and the knowable. This is prompting questions on the nature of scientific knowledge. A central issue is what defines a 'good' model. When addressing global properties of the…
How did it all begin? Although this question has undoubtedly lingered for as long as humans have walked the Earth, the answer still eludes us. Yet since my grandparents were born, scientists have been able to refine this question to a…
The theory of cosmological perturbations has become a cornerstone of modern quantitative cosmology since it is the framework which provides the link between the models of the very early Universe such as the inflationary Universe scenario…
In this paper we present the problem of quantum to classical transition of quantum fluctuations during inflation and in particular the question of evolution of entanglement. After a general introduction, three specific very recent works are…
We contrast the possibility of inflation starting a) from the universe's inception or b) from an earlier non-inflationary state. Neither case is ideal since a) assumes quantum mechanical reasoning is straightforwardly applicable to the…
Eternal inflation is a seemingly generic consequence of theories that give rise to accelerated expansion of the universe and possess multiple vacuum states. Making predictions in an eternally inflating universe is notoriously difficult…
A wide variety of vacua, and their cosmological realization, may provide an explanation for the apparently anthropic choices of some parameters of particle physics and cosmology. If the probability on various parameters is weighted by…
We give a consistent description of how the inflationary Universe emerges in quantum cosmology. This involves two steps: Firstly, it is shown that a sensible probability peak can be obtained from the cosmological wave function. This is…
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…
In this work, we analyze two possible alternative and model-independent approaches to describe the inflationary period. The first one assumes a general equation of state during inflation due to Mukhanov, while the second one is based on the…
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…
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 propose a method to extract predictions from quantum cosmology for inflation that can be confronted with observations. Employing the tunneling boundary condition in quantum geometrodynamics, we derive a probability distribution for the…
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,…