Related papers: Cosmic Inflation: Trick or Treat?
This note makes a self-contained exposition of the basic facts of big bang cosmology as they relate to inflation. The fundamental problems with that model are then explored. A quartic scalar potential model of inflation is evaluated which…
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…
There exists the "entropy problem" of the early universe, that is, why did the universe begin with an extremely low entropy and how did it evolve into such high entropy at late times? It has been long believed that inflation cannot be the…
Alan Guth introduced cosmologists to inflation at the 1980 Texas Symposium. Since, inflation has had almost as much impact on cosmology as the big-bang model itself. However, unlike the big-bang model, it has little observational support.…
Informed by a quantum information perspective, we interpret cosmological expansion of space as growing entanglement between underlying degrees of freedom. In particular, we focus on inflationary cosmology, which, while being a successful…
Open Inflation has recently been suggested as a possible way out of the age crisis caused by observations of a large rate of expansion of the universe, in conflict with the existence of very old globular clusters. It proposes that our local…
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,…
The standard big bang cosmological model and the history of the early universe according to the grand unified theories of strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions are summarized. The shortcomings of big bang are discussed together with…
According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…
After a brief summary of general relativity and cosmology, we present the basic concepts underlying inflation, the currently best motivated models for the early Universe. We describe the simplest inflation models, based on a single scalar…
While there is no consensus about the history of time since the beginning, in this paper I will discuss some possibilities. We have a pretty clear picture of cosmic history from the electroweak phase transition through the time 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,…
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…
Recent results from cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments verify several of the predictions of inflation, while ruling out a number of alternative structure-formation scenarios. Given the successes of the theory, the obvious next…
Although the inflationary paradigm is the most widely accepted explanation for the current cosmological observations, it does not necessarily correspond to what actually happened in the early stages of our Universe. To decide on this issue,…
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…
Space-based missions studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have progressively refined the parameter space in conventional models of inflation shortly ($\sim 10^{-37}$ seconds) after the big bang. While most inflationary scenarios…
It is commonly believed that our Universe has experienced two different stages of accelerated expansion. The early stage is known as inflation and the current acceleration is driven by dark energy. Observing inflation and dark energy…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
On the one hand, inflation is an extremely convincing scenario: it solves most cosmological paradoxes and generates fluctuations that became the seeds for the growth of structures. It, however, suffers from a "naturalness" problem:…