Related papers: Inflaton candidates: from string theory to particl…
Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…
A direct detection of primordial gravitational waves is the ultimate probe for any inflation model. While current CMB bounds predict the generic scale-invariant gravitational wave spectrum from slow-roll inflation to be below the reach of…
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,…
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 review cosmological inflation and its realization in quantum field theory and in string theory. This material is a portion of a book, also entitled "Inflation and String Theory", to be published by Cambridge University Press.
These lectures present a brief review of inflationary cosmology, provide an overview of the theory of cosmological perturbations, and then focus on the conceptual problems of the current paradigm of early universe cosmology, thus motivating…
Inflationary cosmology is the leading explanation of the very early universe. Many different models of inflation have been constructed which fit current observational data. In this work theoretical and numerical methods for constraining the…
The existence of the inflationary era in the early Universe seems to be strongly supported by recent CMB observations. However, only a few realistic inflation scenarios which have close relation to particle physics seem to have been known…
This is a review of particle-theory models of inflation, and of their predictions for the primordial density perturbation that is thought to be the origin of structure in the Universe. It contains mini-reviews of the relevant observational…
The ability to test and constrain theories of cosmic inflation will advance substantially over the next decade. Key data sources include cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements and observations of the distribution of matter at…
We present a detailed derivation of the recently suggested new type of hill-top inflation [arXiv:1509.07270] originating from the microcanonical density matrix initial conditions in cosmology driven by conformal field theory (CFT). The…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…
The supergravity (SUGRA) theories with exact global $U(1)$ symmetry or shift symmetry in K\"ahler potential provide the natural frameworks for inflation. However, the quadratic inflation is disfavoured by the new results on primordial…
Inflationary scenarios motivated by the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) where five scalar fields are non-minimally coupled to gravity are considered. The potential of the model and the function of non-minimal coupling are…
In spite of the phenomenological successes of the inflationary universe scenario, the current realizations of inflation making use of scalar fields lead to serious conceptual problems which are reviewed in this lecture. String theory may…
The main aim of this paper is to provide a qualitative introduction to the cosmic inflation and its relationship with current cosmological observations. The inflationary model solves many of the fundamental problems that challenge the…
The $\alpha$-attractor models are some of the most interesting models of inflation from the point of view of upcoming observations in cosmology and also attractive from the point of view of supergravity. We confront representative models of…
In this paper, we analyze the inflationary cosmology using string field theory. This is done by using the zero level contribution from string field theory, which is a non-local tachyonic action. We will use the non-local Friedmann equations…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
Starting with a study of the cosmological solution to the Einstein equations for the internal spacetime of an extreme supermassive cosmic string kink, and by evaluating the probability measure for the formation of such a kink in…