Related papers: Challenges to Inflation in the Post-Planck Era
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…
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…
The first year of observations by the Planck satellite mission shows that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations are consistent with gaussian statistics in the primordial perturbations, a key prediction of the simplest models of…
Recent cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations put strong constraints on the spatial curvature via estimation of the parameter $\Omega_k$ assuming an almost scale invariant primordial power spectrum. We study the evolution of the…
We summarize the utility of precise cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization measurements as probes of the physics of inflation. We focus on the prospects for using CMB measurements to differentiate various inflationary mechanisms. In…
It has recently been suggested that Planck scale physics may effect the evolution of cosmological fluctuations in the early stages of cosmological inflation in a non-trivial way, leading to an excited state for modes whose wavelength is…
In forthcoming years, connections between cosmology and particle physics will be made increasingly important with the advent of a new generation of cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiments. Here, we review a number of these links. Our…
We investigate the impact of different choice of prior's range for the reheating epoch on cosmic inflation parameter inference in light of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy measurements from the {\em Planck} 2018 legacy release…
Current measurements of the temperature and polarization anisotropy power spectra of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) seem to indicate that the naive expectation for the slow-roll hierarchy within the most simple inflationary paradigm…
Recent observations about the cosmic microwave background evidence a clear discrepancy between the scale of inflation and the Planck scale expected in the conventional inflationary picture, based on simple chaotic inflationary models. This…
Recent cosmic microwave background observations favor low energy scale inflationary models in a closed universe. However, onset of inflation in such models for a closed universe is known to be severely problematic. In particular, such a…
In most inflationary models, space-time inflated to the extent that modes of cosmological size originated as modes of wavelengths at least several orders of magnitude smaller than the Planck length. Recent studies confirmed that, therefore,…
Given the latest observational constraints coming from the joint analyses of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, the Planck Satellite and other missions, we point out the possibility of reconciling fundamental particle-physics models of…
We present the status of our study into the feasibility of estimating the parameters of inflation from planned satellite observations of the anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).We describe a perturbative procedure for…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
In a previous paper we proposed a new approach to the beginning of inflation -- a lingering universe. The universe begins in a lingering state with a nearly vanishing Hubble parameter. This calls into question the absolute age of the…
In the context of inflationary models with a pre-inflationary stage, in which the Einstein equations are obeyed, the weak energy condition is satisfied, and spacetime topology is trivial, we argue that homogeneity on super-Hubble scales…
Recently, the Planck 2013 results showed possible evidence for a dipolar power modulation of the CMB temperature fluctuations at low--(\ell) multipoles. This anomaly might imply certain deviations from statistical isotropy. To incorporate…
Recent Planck data show the anomalies of CMB fluctuations on large angular scales, which confirms the early observations by WMAP. We continue studying an inflationary model, in which before the slow roll inflation the universe is in a…
This article provides an introductory review of inflation and cosmological perturbation theory. I begin by motivating the need for an epoch of inflation during the early stages of the radiation dominated era, and describe how inflation is…