Related papers: Cosmic Inflation, Dark Energy and Gravitational Wa…
A modified model of gravity with additional positive and negative powers of the scalar curvature, $R$, in the gravitational action is studied. This is done using the Palatini variational principle. It is demonstrated that using such a model…
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…
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:…
The combination of non-minimal couplings to gravity with the post-inflationary kinetic-dominated era typically appearing in quintessential inflation scenarios may lead to the spontaneous symmetry breaking of internal symmetries and its…
The formation of structure in the Universe offers some of the most powerful evidence in favour of the existence of dark matter in the Universe. We summarize recent work by ourselves and our collaborators, using linear and quasi-linear…
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…
A better understanding of the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe is arguably the most pressing question in cosmology. The most compelling and promising theoretical paradigm, Inflation + Cold Dark Matter, holds that the…
Recently Peebles and Vilenkin proposed and quantitatively analyzed the fascinating idea that a substantial fraction of the present cosmic energy density could reside in the vacuum potential energy of the scalar field responsible for…
Recently, attempts have been made to understand the apparent near coincidence of the present dark energy and matter energy in terms of a dynamical attractor-like solution for the evolution of a scalar field. In these models the field…
Inflation predicts a primordial gravitational wave spectrum that is slightly ``red,'' i.e., nearly scale-invariant with slowly increasing power at longer wavelengths. In this paper, we compute both the amplitude and spectral form of the…
It has been known for some time that the usual inference drawn from the observed near-flatness of the large-scale Universe - namely the existence of a cosmological "flatness problem", which is then taken as a partial, but key motivation for…
We study a model of quintessential inflation in the context of Palatini gravity. As a representative example, we consider the Peebles-Vilenkin model of quintessential inflation with a small non-minimal coupling to gravity, which is…
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…
Assuming that inflation is followed by a phase where the energy density of the Universe is dominated by a component with a general equation of state, we evaluate the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves induced in the…
A period of rapidly accelerating expansion is expected in the early Universe implemented by a scalar field slowly rolling down along an asymptotically flat potential preferred by the current data. In this paper, we point out that this…
We discuss the effects of cosmic phase transition on the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves generated during inflation. The energy density of the scalar condensation responsible for the phase transition may become sizable at the…
An epoch of accelerated expansion, or inflation, in the early universe solves several cosmological problems. While there are many models of inflation only recently has it become possible to discriminate between some of the models using…
This pedagogical review is devoted to quintessential inflation, which refers to unification of inflation and dark energy using a single scalar field. We present a brief but concise description of the concepts needed to join the two ends,…
The early universe according to the big bang and the grand unified theories is discussed. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized together with their resolution by inflationary cosmology. Inflation, the subsequent oscillation and decay…
In this review I consider several different issues related to inflation. I will begin with the wave function of the Universe. This issue is pretty old, but recently there were some new insights based on the theory of the self-reproducing…