Related papers: A post-WMAP perspective on inflation

I discuss how parameters describing inflation in the very early universe may be related to primordial perturbation spectra. Precision observations of anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) such as those provided by the WMAP…

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…

Alan Guth introduced cosmologists to inflation at the 1980 Texas Symposium. Since, inflation has had almost as much impact on cosmology as the big-bang model itself. However, unlike the big-bang model, it has little observational support.…

We confront the predicted effects of hybrid inflationary models on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) with three years of Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observations. Using model selection, we compare the ability of a simple…

In these lectures I review the standard hot big-bang cosmology, emphasizing its successes, its shortcomings, and its major challenge---a detailed understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. I then discuss the motivations…

Inflationary cosmology has proved to be the most successful at predicting the properties of the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). In this essay we show that quantum field renormalization significantly…

Recent measurements of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) indicate that the Universe is flat and that large-scale structure grew via gravitational infall from primordial adiabatic perturbations. Both of these…

Measurements of CMB anisotropy and, more recently, polarization have played a very important role allowing precise determination of various parameters of the `standard' cosmological model. The expectation of the paradigm of inflation and…

The weak gravity conjecture imposes severe constraints on natural inflation. A trans-Planckian axion decay constant can only be realized if the potential exhibits an additional (subdominant) modulation with sub-Planckian periodicity. The…

We analyse the implications for inflationary models of the cosmic microwave background (cmb) anisotropy measured by COBE. Vacuum fluctuations during inflation generate an adiabatic density perturbation, and also gravitational waves. The…

We consider the observational constraints on the running-mass inflationary model, and in particular on the scale-dependence of the spectral index, from the new Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropy measurements performed by WMAP and…

We present the final nine-year maps and basic results from the WMAP mission. We provide new nine-year full sky temperature maps that were processed to reduce the asymmetry of the effective beams. Temperature and polarization sky maps are…

The most important criteria for a successful inflation are to explain the observed temperature anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background radiation, and exiting inflation in a vacuum where it can excite the Standard Model quarks and…

We consider the prospects of probing features in the primordial power spectrum with future Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization measurements. In the scope of the inflationary scenario, such features in the spectrum can be produced…

Monetary inflation is a sustained increase in the money supply than can result in price inflation, which is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services. The objectives of this paper were to develop economic models to (1)…

A recent paper argued that it is not possible to infer the energy scale of inflation from the amplitude of tensor fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background, because the usual connection is substantially altered if there are a large…

This article investigates the predictions of an inflationary phase starting from a homogeneous and anisotropic universe of the Bianchi I type. After discussing the evolution of the background spacetime, focusing on the number of e-folds and…

We review locked inflation and we critically address phenomenological and consistency issues thathave appeared in the literature. A natural window of opportunity is found for the original scenario.Moreover, a simple way to enlarge the…

We emphasize that the estimation of cosmological parameters from cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy data, such as the recent high resolution maps from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1, requires assumptions about the primordial spectra. The…

With the growing consensus on simple power law inflation models not being favored by the PLANCK observation, dynamics for the non-standard form of the inflaton potential gain significant interest in the recent past. In this paper, we…