Related papers: Cosmic Inflation
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of inflation and dark energy in terms of a single scalar degree of freedom, the cosmon. We present here a comprehensive overview of this appealing paradigm, highlighting its key…
In this talk I will review the present status of inflationary cosmology and its emergence as the basic paradigm behind the Standard Cosmological Model, with parameters determined today at better than 10% level from CMB and LSS observations.…
The early Universe inflation is well known as a promising theory to explain the origin of large scale structure of the Universe, a causal theory for the origin of primordial density fluctuations which may explain the observed density…
A class of well-motivated models of inflation end by producing cosmic strings. The current status of efforts to calculate and observe the signals from such models are outlined, with a particular emphasis on cosmic strings, and on the Cosmic…
Inflation produces super-horizon sized perturbations that ultimately return within the horizon and are thought to form the seeds of all observed large scale structure in the Universe. But inflationary predictions can only be compared with…
The early cosmic inflation, when taken along with the recent observations that the universe is currently dominated by a low density vacuum energy, leads to at least two potential problems which modern cosmology must address. First, there is…
Detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background indicate the large-scale homogeneity of the universe. On very small scales, we observe however inhomogeneities such as galaxies, stars, planets and ourselves. In the context of hot…
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a precious window on fundamental physics at very high energy scales, possibly including quantum gravity, GUTs and supersymmetry. The CMB has already enabled defect-based rivals to inflation to…
We investigate the quantum cosmological tunneling scenario for inflationary models. Within a path-integral approach, we derive the corresponding tunneling probability distribution. A sharp peak in this distribution can be interpreted as the…
We study how the initial inhomogeneities of the spatial curvature affect the onset of inflation in the closed universe. We consider a cosmological model which contains a radiation and a cosmological constant. In order to treat the…
Here $f(R)$-cosmology is discussed using a different approach. This model explains early-inflation, emergence of cosmic background radiation at the exit from inflation, cosmic deceleration during radiation-dominance followed by deceleration…
Anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) contain a wealth of information about the past history of the universe and the present values of cosmological parameters. I ouline some of the theoretical advances of the last few years.…
This article contains a concise review of the theory of inflation. We discuss its main theoretical aspects as well as its observational predictions. We also explain how the most recent astrophysical observations constrain the inflationary…
If cosmic magnetic fields are indeed produced during inflation, they are likely to be correlated with the scalar metric perturbations that are responsible for the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies and Large Scale Structure. Within an…
We discuss the possibility that the inflationary paradigm, undoubtfully today's best framework to understand all the present cosmological data, may still have some viable challengers. The underlying idea for such discussions is that…
Inflation provides a natural mechanism to account for the origin of cosmic structures. The generation of primordial inhomogeneities during inflation can be understood via the spontaneous creation of quanta from the vacuum. We show that when…
There is a persistent state of confusion regarding the account of the quantum origin of the seeds of cosmological structure during inflation. In fact, a recent article (C. Kiefer & D. Polarski, ArXiv: 0810.0087 [astro-ph]) addresses the…
We summarize the physical mechanism by which the Cosmic Microwave Background acquires a small degree of polarization. We discuss the imprint left by gravitational waves and the use of polarization as a test of the inflationary paradigm. We…
This paper is aimed to study the compelling issue of cosmic inflation during rapid oscillations using the framework of non-minimal derivative coupling. To this end, an anisotropic and homogeneous Bianchi I background is considered. In this…
Last couple of decades have been the golden age for cosmology. High quality data confirmed the broad paradigm of standard cosmology but have thrusted upon us a preposterous composition for the universe which defies any simple explanation,…