Related papers: Intro to Effective Field Theories and Inflation
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
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…
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,…
Lecture notes from the 2017 Les Houches Summer School on Effective Field Theories. The lectures covered introductory material on EFTs as used in high energy physics to compute experimentally observable quantities. Other lectures at the…
This is a pedagogical introduction to early cosmology and the host of fundamental physics involved in it (particle physics, grand unification and general relativity). Inflation and the inflaton field are the central theme of this review.…
We investigate the possible influence of very-high-energy physics on inflationary predictions focussing on whether effective field theories can allow effects which are parametrically larger than order H^2/M^2, where M is the scale of heavy…
These lectures describe how the Standard Model of cosmology ($\Lambda$CDM) has developped, based on observational facts but also on ideas formed in the context of the theory of fundamental interactions, both gravitational and…
This is a version of the author's Ph.D. thesis. The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field and to perform a general analysis of the associated non-Gaussianities. We…
The current status of early universe cosmology can be summarized as precision, but inherently limited, data requiring explanation from precision and robust theory. Specifically inflation is presently the single concrete hope for solving the…
The first aim of this lecture is to highlight two areas of recent progress in inflationary cosmology, namely reheating and the quantum theory of cosmological perturbations. The second aim is to discuss important conceptual problems for the…
This is a review article for The Review of Particle Physics 2026 (aka the Particle Data Book), appearing as Chapter 23. It forms a compact review of our understanding of cosmological inflation near the end of 2025. Topics included are…
When energy is not conserved, imprints of new physics on observable cosmology might not follow the rules of local effective actions. By capturing dissipative and diffusive effects, open effective field theories account for the possibly…
The methods of effective field theory are used to study generic theories of inflation with a single inflaton field. For scalar modes, the leading corrections to the ${\cal R}$ correlation function are found to be purely of the $k$-inflation…
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…
This thesis treats the topic of CMB Spectral Distortions (SDs), which represent any deviation from a pure black body shape of the CMB energy spectrum. As such, they can be used to probe the inflationary, expansion and thermal evolution of…
The effective field theory of cosmological perturbations stems from considering a cosmological background solution as a state displaying spontaneous breaking of time translations and (adiabatic) perturbations as the related Nambu-Goldstone…
Small fluctuations around homogeneous and isotropic expanding backgrounds are the main object of study in cosmology. Their origin and evolution is sensitive to the physical processes that happen during inflation and in the late Universe. As…
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…
These lecture notes provide a concise, rapid and pedagogical introduction to several advanced topics in contemporary cosmology. The discussion of thermal history of the universe, linear perturbation theory, theory of CMBR temperature…
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:…