Related papers: Cosmic Inflation
Observational tests during the next decade may determine if the evolution of the Universe can be understood from fundamental physical principles, or if special initial conditions, coincidences, and new, untestable physical laws must be…
These lecture notes provide a concise, rapid and pedagogical introduction to several advanced topics in contemporary cosmology. The discussion of thermal history of the universe, linear perturbation theory, theory of CMBR temperature…
This contribution consists of two parts. In the first part, I review the tunneling approach to quantum cosmology and comment on the alternative approaches. In the second part, I discuss the relation between quantum cosmology and eternal…
We review the status of bouncing cosmologies as alternatives to cosmological inflation for providing a description of the very early universe, and a source for the cosmological perturbations which are observed today. We focus on the…
I argue that cosmological data from the epoch of primordial inflation is catalyzing the maturation of quantum gravity from speculation into a hard science. I explain why quantum gravitational effects from primordial inflation are…
This series of lectures gives a pedagogical review of the subject of cosmological inflation. I discuss Friedmann-Robertson-Walker cosmology and the horizon and flatness problems of the standard hot Big Bang, and introduce inflation as a…
The cosmological model best capable of fitting current observational data features two separate epochs during which the Universe is accelerating. During the earliest stages of the Universe, such acceleration is known as cosmological…
Modern cosmology has created a tight link between particle physics / field theory and a wealth of new observational data on the structure of the Universe. These lecture notes focus on some of the most important aspects concerning the…
The capability of Cosmic Inflation to explain the latest Cosmic Microwave Background and Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation data is assessed by performing Bayesian model comparison within the landscape of nearly three-hundred models of…
We revisit an inflationary scenario in which primordial inhomogeneities arise from a quantum collapse, a stochastic mechanism described in the context of quantum collapse theories in its continuous version and within semiclassical gravity.…
Extended inflation is a promising new approach to implementing the inflationary universe scenario. This paper reviews recent advances including a new, more robust mechanism for ending extended inflation, a new prediction for the density…
Warm inflation, its different particle physics model implementations and the implications of dissipative particle production for its cosmology are reviewed. First, we briefly present the background dynamics of warm inflation and contrast it…
Lecture notes on covariant linear perturbation theory and its applications to inflation, dark energy or matter and the cosmic microwave background.
The discovery of dark energy (DE) as the physical cause for the accelerated expansion of the Universe is the most remarkable experimental finding of modern cosmology. However, it leads to insurmountable theoretical difficulties from the…
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:…
Cosmological inflation and topological defects have been considered for a long time, either in disagreement or in competition. On the one hand an inflationary era is required to solve the shortcomings of the hot big bang model, while on the…
In these lectures I focus on early universe models which can explain the currently observed structure on large scales. I begin with a survey of inflationary cosmology, the current paradigm for understanding the origin of the universe as we…
Focus of these lectures is the challenge of explaining the origin of structure in the Universe. The interplay between quantum field theory and classical general relativity has given rise to several interesting cosmological models which…
This is the LaTeX version of my book "Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology'' (Harwood, Chur, Switzerland, 1990). I decided to put it to hep-th, to make it easily available. Many things happened during the 15 years since the time when…
One way to judge the impact of the inflation concept is to consider where cosmology might be today without it. The Einstein-de Sitter model would not have been so keenly defended, and there might have been more interest in negative space…