Related papers: Inflation at the Edge
This article gives a brief overview of some of the theory behind the inflationary cosmology, and discusses prospects for constraining inflation using observations. Particular care is given to the question of falsifiability of inflation or…
I review the current status of the theory of Cosmic Inflation. My discussion covers the motivation and implementation of the idea, as well as an analysis of recent successes and open questions. There is a special discussion of the physics…
Particle phase transitions in the early universe including electroweak and grand unification ones are well-studied subjects. We point out that there are new possible particle phase transitions around inflation. Those new inflationary…
We present the general discussion on the inflection point inflation with small or large inflaton fields and show the effects of reheating dynamics on the inflationary predictions. In order to compare the model predictions with precisely…
We study the auto-correlation function of CMB polarization anisotropies and their cross correlation with temperature fluctuations as probe of the causal structure of the universe. Because polarization is generated at the last scattering…
We explore a model of the early universe in which the inflationary epoch is preceded by a cosmic bounce, and argue that this scenario provides a common origin to several of the anomalous features that have been observed at large angular…
In the picture of eternal inflation, our observable universe resides inside a single bubble nucleated from an inflating false vacuum. Many of the theories giving rise to eternal inflation predict that we have causal access to collisions…
How well can we constrain the initial quantum state of metric perturbations sourced during inflation? We exhibit an interesting new class of quantum states that entangle the scalar metric perturbations {\zeta} with other fields such as…
In these lectures I review the present status of the so-called Standard Cosmological Model, based on the hot Big Bang Theory and the Inflationary Paradigm. I will make special emphasis on the recent developments in observational cosmology,…
Following the pioneering observations with COBE in the early 1990s, studies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) have focused on temperature and polarization anisotropies. CMB spectral distortions - tiny departures of the CMB energy…
Cosmologists have embraced a particular ad hoc formula for the primordial power spectrum from inflation for universes with $\Omega_0 < 1$. However, the so-called ``Open Inflation'' models, which are attracting renewed interest in the…
Inflation is an early period of accelerated cosmic expansion, thought to be sourced by high energy physics. A key task today is to use the influx of increasingly precise observational data to constrain the plethora of inflationary models…
I present recent work aimed at showing how currently competing theories of the early universe leave their imprint on the temperature anisotropies of the CMB radiation. We consider the 3-point correlation function, as well as the inherent…
Discovered almost forty years ago, inflation has become the leading paradigm for the early universe. Originally invented to avoid the fine-tuning puzzles of the standard model of cosmology, the so-called hot Big Bang phase, inflation has…
At its very beginning, the universe is believed to have grown exponentially in size via the mechanism of inflation. The almost scale-invariant density perturbation spectrum predicted by inflation is strongly supported by cosmological…
We analyse the efficiency of future large scale structure surveys to unveil the presence of scale dependent features in the primordial spectrum --resulting from cosmic inflation-- imprinted in the distribution of galaxies. Features may…
We investigate a framework aiming to provide a common origin for the large-angle anomalies detected in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which are hypothesized as the result of the statistical inhomogeneity developed by different…
The polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is encoded with exactly the same cosmic information as the CMB's temperature anistropy. However, polarization has the additional promise of accurately probing the reionization…
The origin of the $\mu$G magnetic fields observed in galaxies is unknown. One promising scenario is that magnetic fields generated during inflation, larger than 0.1 nG on Mpc scales, were adiabatically compressed to $\mu$G strengths in…
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…