Related papers: Does Chaotic Mixing Facilitate Omega<1 Inflation?
This is a completely rewritten version of the talk I gave at the Philosophy of Cosmology conference in Tenerife, September 2014, which incorporates elements of my IFT Madrid Anthropics Conference talk. The original was too technical. The…
Warm inflation is an interesting possibility of describing the early universe, whose basic feature is the absence, at least in principle, of a preheating or reheating phase. Here we analyze the dynamics of warm inflation generalizing the…
It has recently been shown [1] that light vector particles produced from inflationary fluctuations can give rise to the dark matter in the Universe. A similar mechanism has been discussed in [2] for a non-minimally coupled scalar enjoying a…
A model of inflation is proposed in which compact extra dimensions allow a graceful exit without recourse to flat potentials or super-Planckian field values. Though bubbles of true vacuum are too sparse to uniformly reheat the Universe by…
One of the major pillars of modern cosmology theory is a period of accelerating expansion in the early universe. This accelerating expansion, or inflation, must be sustained for at least 30 e--foldings. One mechanism used to drive the…
In this paper we present an informal description of the Cyclic Inflation scenario which allows our universe to "start" with a negative potential energy, inflate, and then gracefully exit to a positive potential energy universe. We discuss…
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…
Loop quantum cosmology provides a nice solution of avoiding the big bang singularity through a big bounce mechanism in the high energy region. In loop quantum cosmology an inflationary universe is emergent after the big bounce, no matter…
We propose a simple version of chaotic inflation scenario which leads to a division of the universe into infinitely many open universes with all possible values of $\Omega$ from 1 to 0.
We study an inflation model with a flat scalar potential supported by observations and find that slow-roll inflation can emerge after a quasi-cyclic phase of the Universe, where it undergoes repeated expansions and contractions for a finite…
We study numerically the inhomogeneous pre-big-bang inflation in a spherically symmetric space-time. We find that a large initial inhomogeneity suppresses the onset of the pre-big-bang inflation. We also find that even if the pre-big-bang…
We revisit the compatibility between the chaotic inflation, which provides a natural solution to the initial condition problem, and the metastable electroweak vacuum, which is suggested by the results of LHC and the current mass…
Cosmological inflation remains to be a unique mechanism of generation of plausible initial conditions in the early universe. In particular, it generates the primordial quasiclassical perturbations with power spectrum determined by the…
We propose a model of inflation with a suitable potential for a single scalar field which falls in the wide class of hilltop inflation. We derive the analytical expressions for most of the physical quantities related to inflation and show…
The current status of early universe cosmology can be summarized as precision, but inherently limited, data requiring explanation from precision and robust theory. Specifically inflation is presently the single concrete hope for solving the…
We investigate if the observed small and nearly scale-invariant primordial cosmic perturbation, i.e. the perturbation amplitude $P_\zeta\sim10^{-9}$ and the spectral index $n_s \simeq 0.965$, is typical in the landscape of vacua after…
We consider the eternal inflation scenario of the slow-roll/chaotic type with the additional element of an objective collapse of the wave function. The incorporation of this new agent to the traditional inflationary setting might represent…
The inflationary and pre-inflationary evolution of scalar modes of cosmological perturbations in a closed universe is analyzed for a loop quantum cosmology model with an inflationary regime consistent with the constraints on inflation…
Recently, a model of inflation using non-minimally coupled massive vector fields has been proposed. For a particular choice of non-minimal coupling parameter and for a flat FRW model, the model is reduced to the model of chaotic inflation…
In previous work, we showed that the answer to the question posed in the title cannot be found within an equilibrium setting. The inclusion of {\em dynamical} backreaction effects from massive long wavelength modes on the initial DeSitter…