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We review the theoretical implications of the past decade of CMB anisotropy measurements, which culminated in the recent detection of the first feature in the power spectrum, and discuss the tests available to the next decade of…
Observational consequences of inflationary cosmology in the holographic dual of the Randall-Sundrum type II braneworld scenario, as motivated by the AdS/CFT correspondence, are investigated. High energy corrections to the standard…
Cosmic inflation is arguably the most favoured paradigm of the very early Universe. It postulates an early phase of fast, nearly exponential, and accelerated expansion. Inflationary models are capable of explaining the overall flatness and…
The tremendous experimental progress in cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature and polarization anisotropy studies over the last few years has helped establish a standard paradigm for cosmology at intermediate epochs and has…
The leading candidate for the very early universe is described by a period of rapid expansion known as inflation. While the standard paradigm invokes a single slow-rolling field, many different models may be constructed which fit the…
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…
Observational cosmology is in its "golden age" with a vast amount of recent data on the distribution of matter and light in the universe. This data can be used to probe theories of the very early universe. It is small amplitude cosmological…
The evolution of a scalar field is explored taking into account the presence of a background fluid in a positively curved Universe in the framework of loop quantum cosmology. Though the mechanism that provides the initial conditions for…
Recent microwave polarization measurements from the BICEP2 experiment may reveal a long-sought signature of inflation. However, these new results appear inconsistent with the best-fit model from the Planck satellite. We suggest a…
The inflationary paradigm is an important cornerstone of the concordance cosmological model. However, standard inflation cannot fully address the transition from an early homogeneous and isotropic stage, to another one lacking such…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
We construct a class of single small field models of inflation that can predict, contrary to popular wisdom, an observable gravitational wave signal in the cosmic microwave background anisotropies. The spectral index, its running, the…
Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a…
The inflationary scenario, which states that the early universe underwent a brief but dramatic period of accelerated spatial expansion, has become the current paradigm of early universe cosmology. Although inflationary cosmology has its…
Using the dS/QFT correspondence in the context of inflation allows for the study of interesting, otherwise inaccessible physics. In particular, by studying inflation via its dual field theory at the boundary of the de Sitter space, it may…
We study how the next generation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) measurement missions (such as EPIC, LiteBIRD, PRISM and COrE) will be able to constrain the inflationary landscape in the hardest to disambiguate situation in which…
We re-analyze the question of the use of cosmological observations to infer the present state and future evolution of our patch of the universe. In particular, we discuss under which conditions one might be able to infer that our patch will…
The polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) provides a plethora of information about the early universe. Most notably, gravitational waves from the Inflationary epoch (the leading explanation of the origin of the universe)…
The scale at which supersymmetry is broken and the mechanism by which supersymmetry breaking is fed down to the observable sector has rich implications on the way Nature may have chosen to accomplish inflation. We discuss a simple model for…
An introductory account is given of the modern understanding of the physics of the early Universe. Particular emphasis is placed on the paradigm of cosmological inflation, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the…