Related papers: Recent Progress in Inflationary Cosmology
Yes, if the universe has compact topology. Inflation is currently the most elegant explanation of why the universe is old, large, nearly flat, homogeneous on large scales and structured on small scales. One of the weaknesses of the…
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…
We discuss various models of inflationary universe with $\Omega \not = 1$. A homogeneous universe with $\Omega > 1$ may appear due to creation of the universe "from nothing" in the theories where the effective potential becomes very steep…
Inflationary cosmology explains the homogeneity and large-scale structure of the universe through a brief epoch of accelerated expansion following the Big Bang. Cyclic cosmologies, in contrast, describe a universe undergoing successive…
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…
One of the fundamental problems of modern cosmology is to explain the origin of all the matter and radiation in the Universe today. The inflationary model predicts that the oscillations of the scalar field at the end of inflation will…
It is very difficult to obtain a realistic model of a closed inflationary universe. Even if one fine-tunes the total number of e-folds to be sufficiently small, the resulting universe typically has large density perturbations on the scale…
In this review I briefly describe the evolution of the inflationary theory from the scenario based on the idea of supercooling and expansion in the false vacuum toward the theory of eternally expanding self-reproducing inflationary…
Quantum geometry predicts that a universe evolves through an inflationary phase at small volume before exiting gracefully into a standard Friedmann phase. This does not require the introduction of additional matter fields with ad hoc…
We present a natural scenario for obtaining an open universe ($\Omega _0<1$) through inflation. In this scenario, there are two epochs of inflationary expansion---an epoch of `old inflation,' during which the inflaton field is stuck in a…
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.…
Inflation has been the leading early universe scenario for two decades, and has become an accepted element of the successful `cosmic concordance' model. However, there are many puzzling features of the resulting theory. It requires both…
We consider a novel model of cosmic inflation. In our model one does not need any specific matter field to drive inflation, but inflation stems from the microscopic, Planck scale structure of spacetime, thus being of quantum gravitational…
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…
Cosmological models with inflation and those with bounce have their own strengths and weaknesses. Here we construct a model in which a phase of bounce is followed by a viable inflationary phase. This incorporates several advantages of both…
In order to draw out the essential behavior of the universe, investigations of early universe cosmology often reduce the complex system to a simple integrable system. Inflationary models are of this kind as they focus on simple scalar field…
The theory of reheating of the Universe after inflation is developed. The transition from inflation to the hot Universe turns out to be strongly model-dependent and typically consists of several stages. Immediately after inflation the field…
In this talk we discuss three different issues. First of all, there exist several proposals how to solve cosmological problems by adiabatic expansion of the Universe, without any use of inflation. We explain why these models do not solve…
We study the dynamics of two concrete inflationary models, namely Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking Inflation as well as Loop Inflation. We constrain the parameters for which a viable inflationary Universe emerges using the latest PLANCK…
It is already understood that the increasing observational evidence for an open Universe can be reconciled with inflation if our horizon is contained inside one single huge bubble nucleated during the inflationary phase transition. In this…