Related papers: Inflation and Precision Cosmology
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…
We explore some issues in slow roll inflation in situations where field excursions are small compared to $M_p$. We argue that for small field inflation, minimizing fine tuning requires low energy supersymmetry and a tightly constrained…
An introductory account is given of the inflationary cosmology, which postulates a period of accelerated expansion during the Universe's earliest stages. The historical motivation is briefly outlined, and the modelling of the inflationary…
Solid inflation is a cosmological model where inflation is driven by fields which enter the Lagrangian in the same way as body coordinates of a solid matter enter the equation of state, spontaneously breaking spatial translational and…
Motivated by the prospect of testing inflation from precision cosmic microwave background observations, we present analytic results for scalar and tensor perturbations in single-field inflation models based on the application of uniform…
Inflationary predictions of the cosmic microwave background anisotropy are often based on the slow-roll approximation. We study the precision of these predictions and compare them with the recent data from BOOMERanG and MAXIMA-1.
Attention has been recently drawn towards models in which inflation and quintessence schemes are unified. In such `quintessential inflation' models, a unique scalar field is required to play both the role of the inflaton and of the…
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,…
Following recent studies of Ford, we suggest -- in the framework of general relativity -- an inflationary cosmological model with the self-interacting spinning matter. A generalization of the standard fluid model is discussed and estimates…
We calculate power spectra of cosmological perturbations at high accuracy for two classes of inflation models. We classify the models according to the behaviour of the Hubble distance during inflation. Our approximation works if the Hubble…
We explore inflationary cosmology in a theory where there are two scalar fields which non-minimally couple to the Ricci scalar and an additional $R^2$ term, which breaks the conformal invariance. Particularly, we investigate the slow-roll…
One common approach for cosmic inflation consists in couple Einstein's gravity with a scalar field, often referred to inflaton field. In order to derive analytic simple scenarios, we usually work in the {\it slow-roll} regime. In such an…
The standard model of cosmology is based on the hot Big Bang theory and the inflationary paradigm. Recent precise observations of the temperature and polarization anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background and the matter distribution…
These lectures are intended to give a pedagogical introduction to the main current picture of the very early universe. After elementary reviews of general relativity and of the standard Big Bang model, the following subjects are discussed:…
The early stages of the universe evolution are discussed according to the hot big bang model and the grand unified theories. The shortcomings of big bang are summarized and their resolution by inflationary cosmology is sketched.…
We compare the standard single scalar field inflationary predictions with those of an inflationary phase driven by a tachyon field. A slow-roll formalism is defined for tachyon inflation, and we derive the spectra of scalar and tensor…
In this work we study four well-known inflationary scenarios that are reported by the most recent Planck observations: Natural inflation, Hilltop quartic inflation, Starobinsky inflationary model, and Large field power-law potentials…
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,…
Formulae are derived for the spectra of scalar curvature perturbations and gravitational waves produced during inflation, special cases of which include power law inflation, natural inflation in the small angle approximation and inflation…
We study the possibility that inflation is driven by a scalar field together with a vector field minimally coupled to gravity. By assuming an effective potential that incorporates both fields into the action, we explore two distinct…