Related papers: Inflation and the Cosmic Microwave Background

The measurements of the statistical properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations enable us to probe the physics of the very early Universe especially at the epoch of inflation. A particular interest lays on the detection…

Cosmic inflation provides a window to the highest energy densities accessible in nature, far beyond those achievable in any realistic terrestrial experiment. Theoretical insights into the inflationary era and its observational probes may…

We summarize some applications of big bang nucleosythesis (BBN) and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) to constrain the first moments of the creation of matter in the universe. We review the basic elements of BBN and how it constraints…

These lecture notes comprise an informal but pedagogical introduction to the well established physics and phenomenology of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) between big bang nucleosynthesis and recombination. The dominant properties of…

The temperature perturbations of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) appear systematically suppressed, at large angular scales, with respect to the prediction of the LambdaCDM concordance model. This behavior might be a glimpse…

Cosmology requires new physics beyond the Standard Model of elementary particles and fields. What is the fundamental physics behind dark matter and dark energy? What generated the initial fluctuations in the early Universe? Polarised light…

The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which permeates the entire Universe, is the radiation left over from just 380,000 years after the Big Bang. On very large scales, the CMB radiation field is smooth and isotropic, but the existence of…

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…

I present a brief review of astro-ph/0406099, which argues that there is a limit on the number of efolds of inflation which are observable in a universe which undergoes an eternally accelerated expansion in the future. Such an acceleration…

A self-consistent modular cosmology scenario and its testability in view of future CMB experiments are discussed. Particular attention is drawn to the enhanced symmetric points in moduli space which play crucial roles in our scenario. The…

Boomerang, Maxima, DASI, CBI and VSA significantly increase the case for accelerated expansion in the early universe (the inflationary paradigm) and at the current epoch (dark energy dominance), especially when combined with data on high…

Observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), especially of its frequency spectrum and its anisotropies, both in temperature and in polarization, have played a key role in the development of modern cosmology and our understanding…

Cosmological inflation is a popular paradigm for understanding Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR); however, it faces many conceptual challenges. An alternative mechanism to inflation for generating an almost scale-invariant…

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…

Cosmic Inflation provides an attractive framework for understanding the early universe and the cosmic microwave background. It can readily involve energies close to the scale at which Quantum Gravity effects become important. General…

The observational status of inflation after the Planck 2013 and 2015 results and the BICEP2/Keck Array and Planck joint analysis is discussed. These pedagogical lecture notes are intended to serve as a technical guide filling the gap…

A radiative seesaw model with an inert doublet dark matter is a promising candidate which could explain the existence of neutrino masses, dark matter and baryon number asymmetry of the Universe, simultaneously. In addition to these issues,…

In this talk I review the present status of inflationary cosmology and its emergence as the basic paradigm behind the Standard Cosmological Model, with parameters determined today at better than 10% level from CMB and LSS observations.

This thesis is dedicated to studying cosmological inflation, which is a period of accelerated expansion in the very early Universe that is required to explain the observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. Inflation, when…

According to the most popular scenario, the early Universe should have experienced an accelerated expansion phase, called Cosmological Inflation, after which the standard Big Bang Cosmology would have taken place giving rise to the…