Related papers: Inflationary Cosmology: Status and Prospects
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…
Inflation is a highly favoured theory for the early Universe. It is compatible with current observations of the cosmic microwave background and large scale structure and is a driver in the quest to detect primordial gravitational waves. It…
The constraints on the models for the structure formation arising from various cosmological observations at different length scales are reviewed. The status of different models for structure formation is examined critically in the light of…
A scenario with two subsequent periods of inflationary expansion in the very early universe is examined. The model is based on a potential motivated by symmetries being found in field theory at high energy. For various parameter sets of the…
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…
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 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…
Over the last decade, cosmological observations have attained a level of precision which allows for detailed comparison with theoretical predictions. In this paper, we briefly review some studies of the current and prospected constraints…
We study oscillatory universes within the context of Loop Quantum Cosmology. We make a comparative study of flat and positively curved universes sourced by scalar fields with either positive or negative potentials. We investigate how…
In this paper the relevance of holographic entropy bounds in the context of inflation is investigated. We distinguish between entropy on large and small scales and confront the entropy of quantum fluctuations in an inflating cosmology with…
I examine the status of inflationary cosmology in light of the first-year data from the WMAP satellite, focusing on the simplest models of inflation: those driven by a single scalar field. The WMAP observation of the Cosmic Microwave…
We have investigated the generality of inflation (the probability of inflation in other words) in closed FRW models for a wide class of quintessence potentials. It is shown that inflation is not suppressed for most of them and for a wide…
A brief account is given of large-scale structure modelling based on the assumption that the initial perturbations arise from inflation. A recap is made of the implications of inflation for large-scale structure; under the widely applicable…
We show how observations of the density perturbation (scalar) spectrum and the gravitational wave (tensor) spectrum allow a reconstruction of the potential responsible for cosmological inflation. A complete functional reconstruction or a…
We survey observational constraints on the parameter space of inflation and axions and map out two allowed windows: the classic window and the inflationary anthropic window. The cosmology of the latter is particularly interesting;…
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…
A new idea of deriving a cosmological term from an underlying theory has been proposed in order to explain the expansion history of the universe. We obtain the scale factor with this derived cosmological term and demonstrate that it…
An overview of some new results in open inflation over the past year, including the calculation of gravity wave contributions to the Cosmic Microwave Background. Proceedings for COSMO-97, held in Ambleside, U.K., hence very short due to…
Various contributions to the cosmological constant are discussed and confronted with its recent measurement. We briefly review different scenarious -- and their difficulties -- for a solution of the cosmological constant problem.
This is a short review, aimed at a general audience, of several current subjects of research in cosmology. The topics discussed include the cosmic microwave background (CMB), with particular emphasis on its relevance for testing inflation;…