Related papers: Inflation at the Edge
The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is a relict of the early universe. Its perfect 2.725K blackbody spectrum demonstrates that the universe underwent a hot, ionized early phase; its anisotropy (about 80 \mu K rms) provides strong evidence…
The polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation carries essential information on early stages of the Universe such as the cosmic inflation, forming cosmological structures through gravitational lensing, and the epoch of…
The presence of multiple fields during inflation might seed a detectable amount of non-Gaussianity in the curvature perturbations, which in turn becomes observable in present data sets like the cosmic microwave background (CMB) or the large…
Cosmology is nowadays going through a true revolution in the quantity and quality of observations that are capable of providing crucial information about the origin and evolution of the universe. In the first years of the next millenium we…
Modern cosmology provides a connection between the physics of particles and fields and observational cosmology. Making use of this link, a wealth of new observational data can be utilized to explore and constrain theories of fundamental…
Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) are discussed, with particular emphasis on current ground-based experiments and on future satellite, balloon and interferometer experiments. Observational techniques and the effects of…
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…
In the past decade, the importance of dissipation and fluctuation to inflationary dynamics has been realized and has led to a new picture of inflation called warm inflation. Although these phenomena are common to condensed matter systems,…
Achieving a precise understanding of galaxy formation in a cosmological context is one of the great challenges in theoretical astrophysics, due to the vast range of spatial scales involved in the relevant physical processes. Observations in…
We discuss the large-scale structure of the universe in inflationary cosmology and the implications that it may have for the long-term future of civilizations. Although each civilization is doomed to perish, it may be possible to transmit…
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,…
Inflation is considered as the best theory of the early universe by a very large fraction of cosmologists. However, the validity of a scientific model is not decided by counting the number of its supporters and, therefore, this dominance…
This review article aims at presenting the theory of inflation. We first describe the background spacetime behavior during the slow-roll phase and analyze how inflation ends and the Universe reheats. Then, we present the theory of…
The standard model of cosmology with nearly Gaussian, isotropic, scale invariant and adiabatic initial conditions describes the cosmological observations well. However, the study of any deviation from the mentioned conditions will open up a…
The isotropy and homogeneity of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) favors "scalar driven" early Universe inflationary models. Non-scalar fields, and in particular gauge fields, are on the other hand commonplace in all high energy…
The anisotropy study cosmic microwave background (CMB) is one of the main observational tools for modern cosmology. However, alongside the study of the thermal fluctuations of the CMB are other equally important information, which is known…
In this paper, inflationary cosmology is reviewed, paying particular attention to its observational signatures associated with large-scale density perturbations generated from quantum fluctuations. In the most general scalar-tensor theories…
We introduce the framework of modular inflation with level structure, generalizing the level one theory considered previously to higher levels. We analyze the modular structure of CMB observables in this framework and show that 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…
The idea that the universe might be open is an old one, and the possibility of having an open universe arise form inflation is not new either. However, a concrete realization of a consistent single-bubble open inflation model is known only…